


say hello to never

by samemoon



Category: The Goldfinch (2019), The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt
Genre: Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Underage Drinking, Underage Drug Use, all canon-typical warnings, boris is a slightly different mess, it gets messier before it gets better, new york fix-it, theo's a whole mess
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-12
Updated: 2019-11-28
Packaged: 2020-12-14 00:21:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 21,465
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21006599
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/samemoon/pseuds/samemoon
Summary: ーand in my unfamiliar babbling-and-wanting-to-talk state I can’t stop myself from blurting the thing on the edge of my tongue, the thing I’d never said, even though it was something we both knew well enough without me having to say it out loud to him in the streetー which was, of courseー“I love you.”Theo tries one more time. Boris gets in the cab. A New York story.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> so i've submitted to the mortifying ordeal of trying to somewhat emulate donna tartt's writing while in no way, shape, or form being donna tartt. this is essentially a rewrite of theo's return to new york with boris thrown into the mix, so the first two or three chapters will borrow heavily from the novel before branching off. enjoy!

It takes almost an hour after our bus has rolled out of the Grand Junction station, on towards Denver, for me to notice that Boris is asleep.

To be fair, our hushed back-and-forth had dwindled to practically nothing now that we’d wolfed down some Burger King at the last stop, now that we’re moderately adjusted to the uncomfortable seats and the constant, bumpy movement; now that we’re coming down from the drugs, coming down from the first incredible adrenaline kick of _ running_. I was too caught in my half-delirious thoughts to realize the lull meant Boris had crashed.

We’re pressed close, arm to arm, knees gently bumping in a staccato sort of rhythm. Boris has his overstuffed school backpack loosely clutched in his lap, using it as a makeshift prop to rest his head on. The dim overhead lights turn his sallow skin ghastly, dark circles standing out like bruises. I can just barely hear his soft, even breaths over the low drone of the bus surrounding us.

Staring at his slack face, I’m pulled back to nights on the living room floor, empty glasses in hand, movie long over. Mornings in bed, sunlight streaming through the window and air conditioning blasting over our shivering forms. 

The normality of it is unsettling, almost. How Boris can snooze like it’s any other night, and not the chaos of a seismic shift so massive I feel like I’m in an episode of Looney Tunes, watching a spidering crack zoom through the ground beneath my feet right before it splits into a vast ravine, pitching me into a free-fall. 

I envy him for that. 

My body is screaming for sleep too, achy and heavy, a headache pulsing at my temples, but I can’t manage it. Not with my chest torn open, gaping wide and vulnerable like it is, the same words catching in a loop around my head with a lighter-than-air quality that hasn’t sunk in yet.

_ You did it now, you did it now, you did something you can’t take back! _

There was this little classic movie theater my mother used to take me to sometimes on East Thirty-Second, right outside Koreatown. Cramped and vintage, down to the old reel projectors. I remember the night we were there to watch _ The Odd Couple_, a favorite of my mother’s, because one of the sprockets got jammed near the end and stuttered over the same nine or ten seconds of the film before kicking back again, clicking all the way. 

Jack Lemmon staring down Walter Matthau, his rant already begun. _ “-click-you’ve done everything for me- click- if it weren’t for you, I don’t know what would’ve happened to me- click- you took me in here, you gave me a place to live- click- you gave me something to live _ ** _for_ ** _ \- click- I’m never gonna forget you for th-” _back again, over and over, for maybe a full minute before someone came to set it right.

That’s how my fevered brain feels now, sprockets jammed, clicking over the scene outside my dad’s house on a dark Vegas street.

_ click- _

Boris, his hands on my face, his lips on mine, all too brief for how deeply it stuns me. _ Good luck, I won’t forget you_.

_ click- _

Me on autopilot towards the cab, my head jumbled with nonsense and heart beating weirdly, off, out of time. Stopping, suddenly, before I can climb in. _ What the fuck am I doing? _

_ click- _

It’s sharp enough to knock me still. I knew Boris well enough to know that if you asked him the right way, at the right moment, he would do almost anything. So why haven’t I?

_ click- _

My feet turning, one after the other. Boris standing stiff, arms crossed over his chest in a way I’d seen before; the memory chills me. His face shadowed in something too murky to call _ resignation_. I get close enough to see his pinched brows lift in surprise.

I want to call this an out of body experience, but the blood roaring in my ears is so loud; Boris’s pitch-black stare is rooting me to the asphalt, to the earth. This is something different. This is the universe shrinking down to me, and him, _ me and him_, and nothing and no one else.

_ click- _

Boris, his chapped lips, his hands that cradled my jaw, his tangled, overlong hair and yellowed Russian paperbacks and his boiling hot tea with three sugars and his morose rants and deceptively strong punches and his breath on the back of my neck and _ Potter _ all slotting together into something terrifying in its weight, its urgency, pressing down on meー

_ click- _

ーand in my unfamiliar babbling-and-wanting-to-talk state I can’t stop myself from blurting the thing on the edge of my tongue, the thing I’d never said, even though it was something we both knew well enough without me having to say it out loud to him in the streetー which was, of courseー

“I love you.”

_ click- _

It comes out ragged, tearing my throat with the force it uses to escape. A huff of air punches out of Boris, blunt and fast, like I’d reached out and hit him in the stomach. 

I don’t know what I expected, but as the silence stretches between us and Boris stares at me with a look too unfamiliar for me to read, I start to think that maybe I’d been wrong about him knowing. Wordless communication with Boris was a thing I’d taken for granted; that it can be yanked from me with a blinded-by-headlights quickness like this scares me.

But the unchained, cracked-open feeling within me scares me more.

_ click- _

“Boris, _ please _ ー” I try again, because I have no choice. I can’t begin to explain how, in this moment, nothing has ever felt so dire. How I’m standing on the knife’s edge of a life without Boris and I’m watching the flutter of a white coat move out of my grasp and I’m plunging into darkness, darkness, darkness, and I _ know_, down to my explosion-jarred, dust-coated bones that I can’t let him walk away.

I_ can’t_.

“Okay,” Boris cuts in, so quietly that I might not have heard him if there were anything but the barren maw of the desert behind us. 

“Okay,” he repeats, a little louder, a little shaky, so different from his cheerful lies just minutes ago. My heart strikes a painful beat in my chest. “Okay Potter, we go.”

Before I can move, breathe, say something colossally stupid like _Really?_ _You’re sure?_ Boris is ushering me to the cab, Popchyk wiggling in my hold, and we clamber into the backseat gracelessly, but together.

_ click click click- _

At the time I wasn’t thinking about how my words were the proverbial ACME anvil, careening down to splinter the canyon below.

I push my forehead into the cool, humming glass of the bus window in an attempt to soothe the pounding in my skull. After we piled in, Boris had directed the cab driver down the hellishly dark roads to his equally hellish and dark house. _ Ten minutes, not even! _ He promised the driver, but his eyes were locked on mine before he hopped out. I was still in so much shock that he actually _ got in the cab _ with me that none of it felt real, not time, not his wordsー I half-expected Boris to disappear into that black hole of a house and never return, leaving me idling in the back of a musty cab for the rest of eternity. 

But he _ did _return, bustling out with a ratty suitcase dragging behind him and his backpack slung over his shoulder, stuffed full to bursting.

I must pass out without realizing, because the next thing I know I’m being shaken awake by a familiar hand on my shoulder. “C’mon Potter,” Boris mumbles sleepily, wading into my muddled consciousness. “Rest stop.” 

I’m so disoriented when I crack my eyes open that I honestly forget where we are for a few seconds, and _ why_. Boris shifts his grip and I tense on reflex, expecting it to land on my cheek in one of those light slaps Boris loves to rouse me with; instead, he strokes his cupped palm up and down my arm in a motion that’s halfway between rally and comfort. “Up, up,” Boris says, his raspy-warm, just-woken voice as much a part of me as anything by now. 

That touch is the thing that jolts me into alertness, how it catches me off guard. Those kinds of soft, anchoring touches between us were relegated long ago to the dark of night, locked bedrooms, unspoken agreements. We don’t talk about it when morning comes, and we never dare to venture there in public. Even if _ public _ is the back of an empty Greyhound bus.

_ Seismic shift_, my mind supplies as my stiff limbs scrabble out of the seat after Boris, Popchyk’s secret bag smuggled between us. _ Free fall. _

_ You did this. _

My axis tilts back, little by little, as we fall into our more well-worn patterns. Each rest stop becomes a routine of us splitting sandwiches and sodas, taking turns running with Popper around deserted parking lots and down dark streets, ducking into the shadowed corners of buildings to pass a cigarette between usー Boris only has two packs on him, and I have none, so we’re on strict rationing for the time being.

It’s not easy. I’m exhausted in a way that stilted naps on a motoring bus can’t come close to curing, jittery and miserable from the drugs leaving my system, but anxiety over Popper being discovered forces me into near-constant vigilance. It crosses my mind, once, how much worse it would be if I were doing this alone.

What if I didn’t have Boris here to laugh at himself as he coaxes Popchyk, out of sight, to spin in circles on the concrete? Or murmur _ spasibo _ as I press a cup of shitty gas station coffee into his hands? No Boris to nudge me into closing my eyes when I canー _ is fine, is fine, I keep watch, okay? _No Boris and his talent for unending chatter to lighten up the boring stretches of highways and bland landscapes.

_ Why there is so much fucking corn in America, huh? Who needs so much! _ Boris had muttered somewhere in Indiana, after passing what felt like our third straight hour of the exact same cornfield. _ Some of it was wheat_, I pointed out unhelpfully.

The thought of doing this without him is so bleak, I can’t dwell on it for long.

Other than having a close call with Popper on the bus, things are largely uneventful. Stop, eat, walk, smoke, repeat. Somewhere past the Ohio border Boris flips his phone open in one of his occasional checks he’s been doing since we got on the road back in Vegas, and scoffs.

“_Wow, really?” _ he reads Kotku’s message aloud with a drawling, sarcastic edge. “That’s it?” he stuffs the phone back into the front pocket of his backpack and zips it up. “What’s the Shakespeare thing…..goodbye is sweet sorrow, _ yah_, sure it is.”

“Parting is such sweet sorrow,” I correct automatically, looking up from my task of slipping Popchyk a potato chip. Boris waves his hand in a _ whatever _ gesture, then snakes it into the chip bag. 

“How long until the rest stop? I’m fucking starving. Yes, I know, I know,” he directs at Popchyk’s snout peeking out of the bag, reaching down with a chip between his fingers.

I brace myself for Boris’s mood to go sour, like it always does after an unsatisfactory exchange with Kotku. Yet he seems to be more or less in the same spirits, quietly cooing to Popchyk in Ukranianー no, Polish. Maybe because it’s over for them, was over the minute Boris climbed into the cab with me.

_ Is it what I said? _Part of me wants to ask. A bigger part of me swells with panic at the very thought of acknowledging the thing that sits between us now, cushion-soft and delicate. 

One action. Three words.

_ You did something you can’t take back. _

_ {good luck, srsly} _is the last message waiting on Boris’s phone, we find out later.

Cleveland is bitterly cold enough for Boris to dig his _ sovietskoye _ coat from his backpack and pull it on over his worn burgundy sweater, complaining the entire time. My own blazer is similarly ill-suited to the job, but we make do, sucking our cigarette down in a hurried back-and-forth before jumping into the relative warmth of the bus.

We sleep in shifts until our transfer in Buffalo. Still a long way from the City, but just passing the _ Welcome to New York- The Empire State _sign at the border twists something deep in my chest.

“Ah God, this sucks,” Boris complains loudly, holding his coat closed with one arm and kicking at the crunchy sleet on the ground. “I need a fucking drink.”

A biting wind whips past us and I think longingly of Mr. Pavlikovsky’s vodka, the gut warmth it always promised. “Yeah, I know,” I say, and I really, truly mean it.

Boris shifts his head from side to side, discreetly eyeing the sparse crowd around us before leaning in close. “We do have _ something_, you know?” he sniffs, pointedly, and I catch on after a few stilted seconds. 

“I dunnoー it’s probably not a good ideaー“ I dart my gaze nervously around the expanse of the bus station, worried someone might hear us, before a sharp look from Boris pulls me back inー _ act natural, idiot! _

“Just a little bump, very little!” he pinches his fingers together in front of his chest. I think about all the ways we could get caught. Popper would be bad enough, I don’t even want to imagine _ this_. We have valuables with us, much more than Boris is aware of. The thought of our bags being confiscated is enough to make me break out in the sweats.

I also never planned to make my grand return home with drugs pumping through my veins, an incongruous holdover from my transient existence out west. I picture running into Andy, or, god forbid, Mrs. Barbour all bedraggled and coked up, and I very nearly laugh. 

“Only enough to take edge off,” Boris continues to whisper, sounding oh-so-reasonable. “To make thisー“ he gestures with a flick of his head over my shoulder at the grim weather, “easier to take.” 

Well, I _ am _really fucking cold.

That’s how we end up huddled together in a blind spot between the back of the building and a dumpster, our propped suitcases shielding us and Boris’s open backpack held carefully between our bent shins as we snort a line each off the back of his hand. 

Boris is right, of course, in his own wayー the world sharpens again, brightens into something that doesn’t feel like quite such a burden to bear. We talk our way through Batavia and Rochester and Binghamton, scarf down cheese danishes in Syracuse. I regale Boris with all kinds of stories about the City, rose-tinted with the ache of my nostalgia, and he chimes in with questions here and there in his usual enthusiastic way. 

I start to come down from the bump we took after that, so by the time we actually get off the bus, in Port Authority, I’m not feeling too hot at all. It makes the rude shock hit me worse, I think, as I look out and realize the cityー _ my _ city, the one I’d longed for so fiercelyー seems foreign, and noisy, and cold and much, much too crowded.

There are cops everywhere. I know that Boris and Iー in our too-big and too-small coats, dirty and tired after sixty-plus hours on the busー don’t really pass muster, but nobody stops us as we hurry outside. Boris seems to know the drill without me telling him: no eye contact with the police, no talking to the assortment of cabbies calling out to us as we hustle down the street, dragging our suitcases behind us. 

“Am not so sure it’s flowers and rainbows like you say, Potter,” Boris tells me sardonically as we stand on Eighth Avenue, getting jostled together by the rush-hour crowd while I try to get my bearings. If I weren’t already so overwhelmed, _ Boris on Eighth Avenue _might have boggled me more than it did. 

I know he’s teasing me by the look on his face, but as it stands, he’s rightー everything seems so much dirtier and unfriendlier than I remembered, cold and gray. It washes over me in a wave of dismay, and, strangely, embarrassment. _ This _ is what I’d promised Boris? This was the great unknown waiting for him? It was suddenly like I’d failed him in some tangible, unforgivable way.

We decide to let Popchyk down, thinking he’d appreciate a chance to get out and walk. A mistake, it turns outー he’s terrified of everything from the noise to the people to the trash blowing down the street, darting forward, jerking this way and that; he dashes behind us and somehow manages to wind the leash around one of Boris’s legs and one of my own at the same time, nearly sending us tumbling out onto the crosswalk in a heap. 

Boris scoops him up after that, soothing him with a pat on the head and murmured Polish. “City is scary, yes? When you’ve never been,” he says matter-of-factly, setting Popchyk back into his bag while I hold it open. _ What if you’re supposed to know it like the back of your hand and that’s why it’s scary? _ I don’t say.

In a daze, I start leading us east toward Park Avenue. Leaving Vegas, I’d somehow felt a lot more confident about how this would all play out. Had I really thought I was going to stroll back to the Barbours’ Fifth Avenue apartment like nothing happened?

Popper would be a big enough conundrum on his own with the chronically allergic-to-everything Andy, but I have Boris too, andー my brain can’t even fathom the image of Boris, in all his scrawny, desert-blown, half-wild glory stepping into that marble foyer, sticking out like an unruly weed within the manicured garden of the living room, cultivated with glazed chintz and Chinese jars. Error 404. Does not compute.

No, I realize with a sinking, queasy clarity. The Barbours are out of the question. 

Boris, who had been taking in the sights without a word, turns his eyes to the sky and quietly curses in Russian. “Looks like rain,” he says mildly, like it’s no matter of his own. I know he’s right with one glance at the low, heavy, dirty clouds. It makes me nervous.

“Is it just me or did the sky seem...bigger, in Vegas?” I know it sounds stupid as soon as it leaves my mouth, but my brain isn’t on my side right now. Jammed sprockets, nobody to come set them right again. Boris, to his credit, treats it like a serious practical question.

“Yah,” he says, leaning into me slightly as we pass a staggering of hurried businesspeople on the sidewalk. “Because there is so much stuff here,” he sweeps his hand upward, across the sardine-can buildings, “and a whole lot of fucking nothing back there.” 

It’s getting darker by the minute, and the panic I’d been trying to keep at bay is pricking at my chest in icy pangs. How could I have been so idiotic to come here without any real sort of plan? Half-cocked, with the desperate sureness that things would fall into place. I’d promised Boris so much, when the reality is that I’d taken him from one miserable situation right into another. 

“Potter?” 

I’m startled out of my spiraling thoughts to look at Boris beside me, illuminated in flashes by the street lamps. His black, searching gaze pulls me out of my head. “You taking us to the rich friend’s house? Looks like rich people’s place.” Hands buried in his coat pockets, he juts his shoulder out at our surroundings. I take a look around and, with a second startle, see that we’ve turned up Fifth Avenue.

His question, though, churns together with my panic and guilt until I feel a little sick. The question was an innocent one, carrying no weight of expectation, but it only reminds me of the gravity of our situation. He still thinks I have some shred of an idea of we’re going to do. How do I tell Boris that not only is Andy’s not an option, I _ have _ no options? One gigantic fool’s errand is what I have, excuse the mix up, many apologies.

I still haven’t worked out what to say to Boris when, looking ahead, I suddenly see itー the Park. My heart seizes; without thinking I grab Boris by the arm and run across Fifty-Seventh (_Hey, hey! Potter, what the hell! _ Boris exclaims, stumbling along beside me), to the leafy darkness. It’s all there, the smells, the shadows, the dappled pale trunks of the plane treesー and yet at the same time it’s dark with the ghost of memory, school outings and and zoo visits of long ago. 

“What, Potter? You used to live in the trees here?” Boris is growing exasperated with my lack of response, clearly not finding the shadowed, streetlamp-lined paths into the Park as mysterious and inviting as I did. 

“I came here almost every day,” I answer faintly, my mind still winding through this map to the past. “Used to meet my mom at the Pond after she got off work.”

Perhaps Boris just doesn’t know what to say, but he lets me have my moment, standing there, debating crossing the threshold into this fairy tale world like I badly want to. _ No_, I think deliriously, _ Boris should see it in daylight first. _

A shock of white blinks by my peripheral and I automatically turn my head. A rumpled man in a business suit, already striding away from me down the sidewalk, but the familiar presence stuns me still.

Mr. Barbour. That’s him, isn’t it? It has to be.

“Potter?”

My attention whips back to Boris, and I can see concern starting to seep into his gaze. “What is it?”

“Iー” I turn to look in Mr. Barbour’s direction again, but he’s already disappeared into a sparse throng of people, practically out of sight. Too far to catch up to him now. 

“You boys looking for some money?” A pudgy, blandly corporate man who had sidled up to us out of nowhere says, and I nearly jump. 

“Well, are you?” he says again, more insistently, and when I look at Boris I can read his eyes loud and clear: _ let’s get out of here_.

We turn to walk away in unit, and that’s when the man steps forward and drops a heavy hand on my shoulder. My heart plummets down to my stomach, but before I can react Boris is there, curling his arm around me and yanking me out from under the man’s hold.

“Fuck off,” he announces with all the casual annoyance of telling Popper to hush, but he’s practically squeezing me into his side. “We’re not for sale.”

Boris turns again, his arm still around me, directing me, and we hurry off down the sidewalk. “Big city is big city is big city,” he mutters blackly once we’ve passed a few people, glancing over his shoulder to make sure we’re not being followed.

Normally I’d be wary of anyone seeing us pressed together like this, but that’s hardly a thought in my head as I try to get a handle on my thundering heart, my jelly-like legs. I feel like I’ve been dealt a double blow, not only the gut-wrench of that creep’s hand on me but also Mr. Barbour fading down the street, a _ could have been _ slipping through my fingers like grains of sand.

Maybe if this were a different timeline I would have chased after Mr. Barbour, called out to him even (_Mr. Barbour, it’s Theo!_) but not here, or now, or ever. A bygone notion.

Boris must sense how rattled I am, because he loosens his hold and gives me a gentle shake. “Don’t know about you, but I’m starved. Let’s find something to eat, yes? Everything will be a little bit better after.”

I have to swallow down the sudden lump in my throat. What would I do if I didn’t have Boris back there, deftly plucking me out of that mess? Buoying me up out of the panic and fear trying to turn me useless?

Still on Central Park South, we buy the last five hot dogs from a vendor just shutting up for the day (two each for us, one for Popper) and I find us an out-of-the-way bench inside the Scholar’s Gate to sit and demolish our food. 

While we eat, I take a good, hard look at our situation. In my desert fantasias of New York I’d sometimes entertained images of Boris and me living on the street, rattling change cups around St. Mark’s Place or Tompkins Square; but now that the very real prospect of sleeping on the streets in the November cold is staring me in the face, it comes down on me like a boot to the back just how fucking _ selfish _ I’d been to beg Boris here with me.

Sure, in Vegas everything was awful, and Boris was already planning to run away, so in my addled, one-track-mind state it didn’t seem like such a sin to coax him into coming with me. You’re leaving anyway, c’mon, let’s go!

I wish I could go back in time and sock myself for having so much faith in the thought that dragging Boris to New York, to scrounge for a living on the streets in the cold and snow that he hates, was the right thing to do. That New York, high up on its pedestal in my head, would be some wonderful happily-ever-after. I want to sock myself for being so _ naïve. _

We should have gone to California. At least Boris would be happy there. 

Our hot dogs gone, Boris pulls his pack of cigarettes and lighter from the inner lining of his coat. He sticks one in his mouth, lights it, passes it to me, then pulls another one out of the pack for himselfー our first full smoke each since we hit the road.

The sacrifice in the gesture is what finally forces me to speak the truth. “We can’t go to Andy’s,” I blurt out, feeling absolutely rotten. Instead of looking at Boris, I watch Popchyk cautiously sniff at a patch of dead grass near the bench.

Boris takes a long drag off his cigarette, ember glowing like a tiny, dying sun of a distant planet. “Yah, I thought so.” he taps ash to the ground, sounding remarkably nonplussed. 

I take a quick drag of my own. “You’re not...I dunno, upset?” he has to know what that means for us. I thought he’d have a few harsh words for me, maybe even want to go separate ways entirely. At the very least I thought he’d be complaining about the cold more. He’s been strangely restrained on both fronts. 

Boris shrugs. “What for? We have enough cash for hotel,” he says in that easy, matter-of-fact manner of his. He’s got all the answers, or he’ll figure them out along the way, no problem.

“We’re not old enough to rent a room,” I point out sullenly, because that _ would _be my first fallback, if it were feasible. My mind flashes to runaway shelters, police, Child Services.

Boris tosses his hands out. “So we make up a good lie!” he says. “Some place must let it slide.” At my skeptical silence, he continues. 

“If that doesn’t work, then we find old building. Or hell, bridge or something. If it comes to that, I can find us a place to kip, Potter, I’m sure of it.” his shining eyes are on me in the semi-darkness, everything about him in that moment starkly earnest, tethering me to his calm presence like the gravitational pull of the moon to the earth. 

“Even if just for tonight, we can do it. And then in the morning we can think more, okay? _ Ne par’sya_.” 

What he’s saying, what he’s _ really _ saying looms just outside my comprehension, gathering momentum like a wave rising in the sea, until all at once it crashes over me, bowls me down, fills my lungsー I’m suddenly positive that if I try to talk, I’ll start crying. 

I have to do _ something_, though, with this raw rush of feeling that's overcome me, something to let Boris know how immensely, wretchedly grateful I am just to have him beside me right now. The area we’re in is deserted, and we’re half-shrouded in shadow anyway, so I reach down for Boris’s unoccupied hand resting between us on the bench and circle my fingers around his bony wrist, squeezing.

Boris tenses in a start, but melts back down against the bench just as quickly. I mean to draw my hand back before too long, before it crosses the invisible line, but I don’t have the energy to force myself to let go. I don’t look at him, and he doesn’t move, and we smoke in silence. 

We still don’t talk when Boris turns his palm under my hold and curls the tips of our numb fingers together, but the _ thing _we’ve both been side-stepping pulses into uncomfortable awareness. It balloons inside me until my heart is laboring in painful, viscous thuds. 

His action, my words.

_ You did it now, you really fucking did it now! _

Here in the dark of a frigid New York bench, light years from that frantic, rash, desert-hot night, I’m so mortified I can barely touch on the memory. I might as well have cut myself open and scraped out my insides with a spoon, like a Halloween jack o’lantern. I’m terrified, terrified to speak about it, to have _ Boris _ speak about it. To bring it out of its paper-thin hiding place and into the air between us.

“You knew it was gonna be a shit show from the start, huh?” I say instead, my voice thick with the tears I finally managed to swallow down. 

Boris shrugs again, keeping our fingers linked. I should pull away. I really should. “Everything goes to shit eventually. Here, there, wherever. Better to be together when it does, I figured.” He flicks his hair out of his face and gives me a wry grin, cigarette hanging between his teeth.

Here on this dark and frigid New York bench I stare at Boris, the whole impulsive mess of him; as much as I wish I could deny it, a spark of that savage desert heat burns in my gut. 

Out of nowhere I feel Boris go stiff next to me, his fingernails nipping into my frozen flesh in a sudden reflex. 

“Let’s go.” His voice is barely a whisper, but the tone sends my hair standing on end, has me jumping to obey on instinct. I risk a glance over to where Boris’s hard gaze is slanted, spotting a man sitting on a bench across the way.

He’s watching us. My stomach turns to ice.

I yank my hand back in a flash. We stub our cigarette butts on the arms of the bench and move quickly to gather up our stuff. I see the man stand out of the corner of my eye and I don’t even bother to put Popper in his bagー I grab him up and hightail it out of there, Boris hurrying alongside me with our suitcases. 

I should probably slow down, I know, but the memory of a heavy hand on my shoulder has fear sharp on my heels and we run across Fifth Avenue. I don’t stop until we reach the Pierre, the circle of light pouring from its warm, well-lit entrance. 

Boris _ thunks _our suitcases down on the ground in front of him. “Jesus Potter,” he pants, winded, “is okay. Look.” I follow the jerk of his chin back over the crosswalk, where nothing but a few pedestrians are passing by. We weren’t followed.

“Oh,” I breathe, a small surge of embarrassment rearing up at my overreaction. Back in that dark, deserted, enclosed space my fear had been acutely real; now, with well-dressed couples milling about, doormen hailing cabs, I feel a little silly. Childish. 

Boris has already moved on, it seems, turning to gaze up to the fancy hotel before us with a small amount of awe. “Think we can make up good enough lie to get in here?” he glances at me with one of his goofy, conspiratorial smiles, as if there was a world where our combined shabby disaster could stroll into that marble and crystal lobby and weasel our way into a spacious suiteー soft robes, shrimp cocktails, champagne, the works.

The fact that he can still find it in him to joke is what makes me laugh, more than anything. “They’d throw our sorry asses out before we even got to the front desk,” I say, butting my shoulder into his arm. 

“We don’t know until we try!” Boris shoots back, undeterred. 

I take a moment to nestle Popchik back into his bag, mulling over a tentative thought in my head. I’d dismissed it earlier for much the same reason I dismissed the Barbours; what I was asking felt too burdensome to be possible. But if I’m honest with myself, this isn’t _ quite _so out of reach as that prim Fifth Avenue apartment. 

I look out over the traffic rushing behind us, overwhelmed with that familiar old Midtown stench, and make a decision. 

“I have an idea.” 

I end up hailing a cab for us. It would have been an easy bus ride, half an hour maybe, but I can’t bear the thought of jolting around on a bus again so soonー whether or not Boris would agree, I think he’s just glad to be out of the cold, judging by his sighed exultation in Ukrainian once we bundle into the back seat. 

Truthfully, I’m not at all comfortable with the notion of turning up at Hobie’s house out of the blue. At some point I’d stopped writing back; I try to tell myself it was the natural order of things, but, shamefully, I know it had more to do with Boris’s casual speculation of Hobie subtly putting me off him. _ Hah! _ A particularly vicious part of my brain jeers._ Did you fool yourself__? _

Even so, it’s our best chance at a roof over our heads and a warm bed. Despite my discomfort, despite how awful I feel at my treatment of Hobie, I owe it to Boris to at least _ try_. He’s shown me, quite literally, that he’s willing to do just about anything for meー can’t I return even half of that? 

So I don’t worry myself sick, I spend the cab ride trying my hardest to imagine Boris down in the workshopー a tameless nomad prowling through the wilderness of dismembered chairs and upturned, claw-footed tables, thick with the reek of turpentine and oil paint and varnish. An odd, wispy thread of kinship floats through my mind’s eye at the thought, nearly within reach.

The shop, I notice once we arrive, is closed-up and dark, as if it had never been opened again in all my time away from New York. Boris peers through the window with casual curiosity as I survey the sheet-draped furniture, the grime; my heart sinks. 

“Can’t see shit,” Boris remarks, more of a simple observation than a grievance.

It takes a long minute to work up my nerve to move over to the door, ring the bell. Boris stands behind me with our bags, surprisingly quiet, as my blood pounds with anxiety and guilt and desperation. Would Hobie turn me away? Would he turn _ Boris _away? We stand for so long I almost convince myself that nobody’s homeー what are we going to do now?ー when the door opens very suddenly and I find myself looking not at Hobie, but a girl my own age. A very, very familiar girl.

Pippa.


	2. Chapter 2

It’s herー Pippa. Still tiny and thin (I realize, distantly, that I’ve grown much taller than her) but healthier-looking than the last time I saw her; a fuller face, her hair grown back in, although a different color and texture than I remember. In my shock I say nothing, and her brow furrows, polite but reticent. Her gaze strays behind me, and I see a hint of wariness flash through her eyes.

“Can I help you?” she says, returning her focus to me. A stranger’s look, a stranger’s question. My heart sinks again in dismay. _ She’s forgotten me. _

How could I have expected her to remember, really? It’s been a long time. I know I look different too. I hear the rustle of Boris shifting, one of our suitcases grazing the the back of my leg, and with a jolt I’m remindedー I’m not alone this time.

And then, thumping down the stairs, coming up behind Pippa, is Hobie. _ He cut his hair, _ is my first, dim thoughtー it’s close to his head and much whiter than I remember. His expression is slightly irritated, and for a gut-clenching moment I’m afraid he doesn’t recognize me either. But thenー 

“Dear God,” he says, stepping back suddenly. 

“It’s me,” I say quickly, lest he shut the door in my face. “Theodore Decker?” 

Pippa darts a look up to Hobie, clearly recognizing my name, even if she doesn’t recognize _ me _; their friendly surprise is such an astonishment that I start to cry.

“Theo.” Hobie wraps me in a hug, strong and parental and so fierce that it makes me cry even harder. Then, with a start, he pulls back a fraction. “Oh,” he says, in vague alarm. “Andー?”

He’s noticed Boris. “He’s with me,” I choke out, as if it’s not plainly obvious. As if Hobie would misunderstand Boris as an unrelated vagrant who had followed me down off the street, waiting patiently in line for handouts. 

“He’s myー my best friend.” I make a futile attempt to wipe away my tears under my glasses before gazing back at Boris for the first time since I stepped in front of the door. He’s still behind me, clutching our suitcases in either hand and looking distinctly uncomfortable. He bows his head in a polite little nod once he realizes all the attention is on him. 

Hobie shifts his hand onto my shoulder, regarding Boris in a stretch of heavy silence that has anxiety buzzing through my blood once more. Sudden, itching awareness of how we must look to the outside eye, dirty and ragged and gaunt as we are, razes over my skin.

“Well,” Hobie says, finally, in a voice of security and authority itself, “a friend of Theo’s is a friend of mine. Come on now.” Then he’s beckoning Boris inside, leading us through the workshopー dim gilt and rich wood smells I’d dreamed ofー up the stairs into the long-lost parlor.

Hobie is speaking, but I can hardly process it all. “It’s wonderful to see you,” and “my goodness, you’ve grown! That hair, like Mowgli the Jungle Boy!” and “Boris, _ Boris! _ Ah yes, I remember now, from Theo’s lettersー” and “You boys look knackered. Are you hungry?” and, when Popper sticks his head out of the bag: “Ha! Who is this?” 

“His name is Popchyk,” Boris offers in the wake of my silence. Pippa, laughing, lifts him up and cuddles him in her arms. 

“Popchik?” She asks, testing the name haltingly.

“Or Popper,” I say, faintly. Seeing Boris here in the parlor, surrounded by its velvets and urns and bronzes, feels like stepping into an alternate dimensionー gone was that boundless, bombastic, desolate desert-universe, and Boris, a native of that riotous place in my mind, is such a bizarre transplant into this world that I feel he might disappear if I so much as blink.

I’m thoroughly overwhelmed as it is, so unmoored that I’m not even embarrassed about crying in front of a small audience. I’m barely conscious of anything but the relief of being hereー I’m here, I’m _ here _, with Boris and Popchyk and an aching, over-full heart. 

Hobie takes us back to the kitchen, where mushroom soup is waiting. I’m not hungry, but it’s warm, and I’m freezing. Boris is enthusiastic enough for the both of us, anyway.

“_ Delicious _ , Mister Hobie,” Boris praises between hearty slurps, “best soup I’ve ever tasted in my lifeー dead serious. Like _ zupa gryzbowa _ー have not had in years.” I can tell by Hobie’s amused half-smile that he’s already on his way to being won over. 

With the charm laid on so well I almost forget that Boris can unwittingly be utterly tactless too, a fact I’m abruptly reminded of when Pippa, cross-legged on the floor to play with Popchik, formally introduces herself after Hobie’s lead-in.

“Pippa,” Boris muses, twisted away from his already-empty bowl, “is not coincidence, right? Can’t be. Too close to Pippi, with theー” he twirls his hand in a vague motion over his head, “red hair and all.”

“Boris!” I hiss, some of that previously lost embarrassment flaring within me. He tosses me a _ what did I do? _ sort of look. _ I _know he means no harm, but Pippa doesn’t; especially with something she’s likely been teased about before, if I can imagine anything of her school life growing up. 

Pippa must be able to sense his complete lack of malice, though, judging by the way the corner of her mouth quirks up when she rolls her eyes. “You’re _ so _ very original,” she says without missing a beat. “I’ve only heard that, oh, a thousand times.” 

Boris holds his hands palm-up in front of his chest. “Am not making fun of you, promise!” he implores. “I love that movie. She’s a smart girl. Very funny.” 

I sit there, flabbergasted as their interaction continues to unfold.

Pippa squints up at Boris, scrutinizing something I’m not privy to. “I can’t place your accent,” she says, absently ruffling Popper’s ears. “Something like British, but _ not _ British, so….Australian?” she tilts her head. “But you roll your _ r’s _like this girl in my geometry classー she’s from Saint Petersburg, I think.” 

“Top marks, Pippi!” Boris crows, slapping his thigh. “Australian, yes, and Russian. Or Ukrainian. Or Polish. Take your pick.” 

This is much closer to an out-of-body experience, I decide. It’s like I’m sinking into a fever dream; yet even in my dreams I’d never imagined _ this _ー Boris and Pippa in the same room, holding a perfectly genial conversation? 

Pippa grins in a way that sharply contrasts the dreamy, morphine-tinged smiles of my memory. “All four of those, really?” she says, but her attention is stolen by Popper jumping into her lap to nip at the pom-poms hanging from the scarf around her neck. 

“Hereー” Boris shifts out of his chair to kneel on the floor close to Pippa. “I’ll show you some things he can do.” he snaps his fingers, firing off a few commanding words in Ukrainian at Popper. 

I watch it all in mute shock, feeling an entirely different sort of unmoored now.

While Boris parades out the scant few tricks he’d taught Popchyk, I explain to Hobie as best I can in my garbled state about my father’s death, and what had happened. Hobie looks extremely worried as I talk, arms crossed, his mulish brow furrowing deeper and deeper. 

“You need to call her,” he says. “Your father’s wife.”

“But she’s not his wife! She’s just his girlfriend!” I protest, trying to keep my voice down. “She doesn’t care anything about me.” 

Hobie firmly shakes his head. “Doesn’t matter. You have to ring her up and tell her you’re alright. Boris too. Who did you sayー his father?”

My stomach drops again, in a way I’m becoming intimately familiar with. “His dad isn’t an option.” The weight of my distress drags my voice to a near-whisper. I _ have _ to make Hobie understand why we can’t do that, whyー “Please believe me, Hobie, it’s _ really _not an option, pleaseー” 

Hobie, looking slightly taken aback at my desperate state, holds a hand up to pacify me. “Alright, alright, slow downーlet’s rewind a bit.” He heaves a sigh through his nose. “We’ll revisit that, but for nowー you really need to call your father’s….girlfriend. Yes, yes you do,” he speaks over me when I try to object, “Right now. This instant. Pips, come along and let’s clear out of here for a bit.” 

Hobie points me to the old-fashioned wall phone, and quite suddenly it’s only a cautious-looking Boris and I left in the kitchen. 

“Xandra,” I murmur in reply to his silent question as I go and pick the phone up from the receiver. Though Xandra is just about the last person I want to talk toー especially after we ransacked her bedroom and stole her tip moneyー I’m still so relieved to be here, relieved to have temporarily avoided the subject of Boris’s guardian, that I would do anything Hobie asked.

I’m surprised when she answers on the first ring. 

“You left the door open,” she accuses almost immediately.

“What?” 

“You let the dog out. He’s run offー I can’t find him anywhere. He probably got hit by a car or something.” 

“No.” My eyes are fixed outside, on the blackness of the brick courtyard. It’s raining, drops pounding hard on the window panes; the first real rain I’ve seen in almost two years. “He’s with me.” 

“Oh.” She sounds relieved. Then, sharply, “Where are you? With Boris somewhere?”

His name prompts me to slide my gaze over to the left. Boris has settled into the kitchen chair closest to me, chewing on his already bitten-down thumbnail. It hits me all at once how exhausted he looksー drooping eyes, dark circles, head lolling nearly to his shoulder.

“No.”

“I ought to call the cops on you, Theo. I know it was you two who stole that money and stuff.” 

“Yeah, just like you stole my mom’s earrings.” 

We quickly devolve into arguing from thereー the subject of my mother is more than enough to spark fire out of the stormy brew of emotion under my skin. I can feel the prickle of Boris’s stare along the side of my face the longer I go on.

In a moment of silence I hear the click of Xandra’s lighter on the other end of the line, a weary inhale. “Look kid, can I say something? Not about the money, honest. Or the blow. Although I can tell you for damn sure, I wasn’t doing anything like that when I was your age. You think you’re pretty smart and all, and I guess you are, but you’re headed down a bad road, you and what’s-his-name. He’s bad news, that kid.”

Hearing that twists something white-hot right down in my core. She doesn’t know a damn thing about Borisー not his pilfered candy bars slipped into my pockets or his whispered words in the dark or the care he takes to split his cash down the middle or his fingers curled around mine on a freezing New York bench.

“You would know.” 

She laughs bleakly. “Well, kid, guess what? I’ve been around the track a few timesー I _ do _ know. He’s going to end up in jail by the time he’s eighteen, that one, and dollars to doughnuts you’ll be right there with him.”

The fear that’s made its home within me snatches the warped kernel of truth in her words, consumes it like kindling; that, more than anything, threatens to send my anger bubbling out over my insides.

“I mean, I can’t blame you,” she continues, raising her voice again. “I loved your dad but he sure wasn’t worth much, and from what he told me your mother wasn’t worth much either.” 

“Okay, that’s it. Fuck you.” I’m so furious I’m trembling. Boris leans forward, elbows on knees, but I don’t look at him. “I’m hanging up now.”

“Noー wait. Wait. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that about your mother. That’s not why I wanted to talk to you. Please, will you wait a second?”

I skate through the rest of the conversation on low-burning hostility. About my dad, about a way to get in touch with me. I give her Bracegirdle’s name, wanting more than anything to get this exchange over with.

I finally hang up the phone just as Pippa ducks into the room. “Oh, you’re done,” she says. “I was just getting the dog a bowl of water.” 

Hobie comes to fetch us after that, and I’m determined to put Xandra out of my mind as he leads us down the hall to the musty spare room. “Hope you boys don’t mind sharing,” he says, “there should be enough spare blankets in the trunk to make up a spot on the floor. There might even be an old sleeping bag somewhere, just a moment, let me checkー” he steps into the room, leaving the three of us out in the hallway.

“I’ll go stock up the towels in the bathroom,” Pippa announces in the ensuing silence. “You two are pretty filthy.” Almost before I can process her words, she claps a hand over her mouth. “Sorryー that was rude.” She looks apologetic. “I just mean, you look like you’ve had a rough journey.”

Shame ripples through me as I once again realize how we must look to others. It had been a thing of such little consequence out in Vegas that it dropped off my radar almost entirely. To have it roar back into glaring focus is rattling, to say the least. 

Boris, unfazed, merely snorts. “_Hell _of a journey, Pippi. Hell of a journey. Let me tell you about the corn.” 

We settle our bags into a corner of the spare room, and after a small argument over the shower (_she’s right man, we’re gross, just do it)_, I concede to use the bathroom first, if Boris promises to follow after.

I scrub myself down as quickly as I can in the old clawfoot tub, trying to ground myself in this strange new reality. Hobie’s bathroom, strawberry shampoo. Pippa’s colorful loofah puff hanging on the wall. Boris waiting in the spare room. I pinch myself, but it doesn’t help much. 

Once we’ve switched off and it’s Boris in the shower, I stand next to the rickety brass bed in a daze, agonizing over what to do. I know I should make up the spare blankets on the floor, for appearance’s sake if nothing elseー although the uneasy voice in my head whispers _ use it, better safe than sorry, what if they see? _

Then again, sleeping in the same room as Boris and _ not _ sharing a bed strikes something so deeply wrong down inside me that I almost can’t consider it. 

My head is starting to pound again. It’s been a long time since I was this bone-tired. Wearily, I shuck the covers back on the bed and sink down to sit on the mattress.

Hobie seems like the type to knock first, right? 

I field a goodnight from the man himself as he bustles down the hallー _ yes, we have everything we need, thank you. _Surely he’s the type, I think. 

It’s not the only thing I have to agonize over. My suitcase, and what it holds inside, stands just within my line of vision. What am I going to do? I need a place to stash the painting, where no one else will stumble across it. I glance furtively around the room, but nowhere seems good enough, secretive enough. 

I’m still stewing in my own indecision when Boris returns, toweling the wild mess of his hair. “Weird old tub,” he remarks, “but cool.” His cheeks are flushed pink from the hot water. He pauses a few feet away from the bed, gazing down at my face.

“What is it, Potter?” 

Pippa appears in the doorway before I can speak, Popchik in her arms. “Well, goodnight,” she says, setting the dog down onto the floor. “I know Hobie already said so, but I’m here too if you guys need anything.”

“Many thanks, Pippi.” Boris sounds grave, going so far as to cross one arm over his chest in a curt bow. Pippa rolls her eyes again in a way I can already tell is fond before pulling the door shut behind her.

And just like that, it’s the two of us.

“Ah, I like her,” Boris says cheerily, slinging his used towel over the desk chair in front of the bed and plopping down next to me. Popchyk makes the leap up onto the mattress right after. “Though I must say, Potter, she is not what I expected.”

At my raised eyebrow, he continues. “You were so ga-ga for her I thought she would be…hotter, or something. Real babe, you know?”

I don’t even want to know where he got the term _ real babe_. I use most of my remaining energy to drive my fist into his arm. “Shut the fuck up.” 

“You’re misunderstanding!” Boris protests, shying away from another potential hit. “Is not an insult, just…you’re sure she’s same age as you? She looks too young.” 

I don’t answer. As mystified as I’ve been in the face of Pippa’s unexpected presence, it’s a troubling fact I can’t easily ignore now. She looks like she hasn’t grown a bit since I last saw herー and with her boyish old corduroys and oversized sweater, her straggly hair, the tips of her ears stuck at a slightly lopsided angle, she has an air of almost disconcerting childishness.

Nothing is quite like I remember, it seems.

I don’t want to talk about it anymore. “Whatever, I’m tired.” I toss my glasses onto the nightstand before rolling onto the mattress and flopping down on my side. It’s just about the softest mattress I’ve ever felt. Fuck, I really _ am _ tired.

I don’t feel any movement from Boris for a long moment, long enough to remember I never bothered with the spare blankets. Then the mattress shifts and the bedside lamp clicks off, plunging us into darkness. 

The mattress dips once more as Boris climbs in, pulls the covers up from the end of the bed. Popper settles down near our feet. I wait, frozen, caught in a half-measure of _ maybe we shouldn’tー _ but then he’s there, his arm over my waist, dragging me into the familiar curve of his body, and I let out the breath I didn’t know I was holding. The tightly-coiled spring within me unravels, and I melt into him. 

I’m slammed with one of those stomach-heaving remindersー I could be alone in this bed right now. I could have wandered the streets on my own, starving and freezing and terrified. Boris could have vanished from my life like a wisp of smoke, with only the touch of his lips to mine to remember him by.

But he’s here. He came with me. He’s _ here_. 

I lay my arm over his own around my waist and interlock our fingers, squeezing him even closer to me. He squeezes back. Desert wind whips in my ears, carrying the words I spoke with it. 

“Theo,” Boris mumbles into my neck, voice thick with impending sleep; the peculiar way he says my name, too much _ t _ and not enough _ h_, sends a surprised rush of warmth through me, all the more for how rare it is to hear it. 

“There is something...I need...to tell you…” 

A memory echoes in my head, against the walls of my father’s house. _ There is something important I need to tell you_.

I wait for Boris to continue, my heart striking a strange beat in my chest. “What?” I prod into the silence. Only the slow, rhythmic rise and fall of his chest against my back answers meー I don’t even have to look to know he’s out like a light.

_ Well, no matter_, I think, my eyelids already sagging. I can always ask him in the morning. 

The dream I have is much more of a nightmare. 

I’m back to that dry Vegas night, standing in front of Boris on the street. Only this time, I hold back the thing on the edge of my tongue. I climb into the cab and watch Boris’s shadowed, haunted face shrink from view until I can’t see him at all, his kiss burning my mouth long after. 

And then I’m in the dark, and I’m breathing dust, and muffled alarm bells clang in the distance as I struggle to get out over too-soft ground. I have a phone in my hand and I’m trying to call Boris, message him, over and over and over but he won’t answer. _ I left him,_ I think, panic clamoring around the cage of my chest like an angry animal. _ I left him, I left him! _ I have to find him, I know I do, but I don’t know how.

I don’t know how. 

It’s so jaggedly _ real _ that when I jerk awake, gasping, I see the empty spot next to me in the morning sunshine and fear immediately strangles my heart. 

I shoot up in bed, pulse pounding. The room itself is empty of human presence, but I can just about make out the fuzzy shapes of our bags on the floor. I yank my glasses from the nightstand so I can make sureー Boris’s ratty suitcase and backpack are there, right next to mine. 

I force myself to suck in a big, calming breath, surrounded by the scent of dried-out potpourri and burnt fireplace wood in this antique-shrined room. He’s here. 

My dream gnaws at the corners of my mind, though, and the overwhelming need to see Boris for myself has me throwing off the covers, heading for the door. If Boris isn’t with me, that must mean he’s with Hobie and Pippa. It sets off a different sort of nervousness in meー what is he doing, what is he saying? What do they think of him? 

Padding down the hallway, I can hear the morning classical program on WNYC, a dream familiarity in the announcer’s warm public radio purr I’d woken up to so many mornings back at Sutton Place. I start to make out voices the closer I get to the kitchen, Boris instantly recognizable to me; I find both he and Hobie at the table, a teapot with two piping cups between them and a crumb-laden plate in front of Boris.

He’s making one of his arm-sweeping gestures mid-sentence, black hair strangely fluffy with its recent wash, when he spots me. “Potter!” he chirps, which alerts Hobie to my presence.

“Well, there you are.” His blue eyes are bright with mirth. “Boris has been regaling us with his worldly travels all morningー an extraordinary life, my word! Straight out of a novel.” He’s dressed for the workshop, knee-sprung corduroys and an old peat brown sweater ragged and eaten with moth holes.

Boris shakes his head dismissively. “Most places, I was only there for a little while,” he says as I awkwardly shuffle over to the table, still spectacularly unused to seeing these two facets of my life meshed together. Just how long has Boris been awake?

Hobie busies himself fetching a plate of toast to set in front of me. “A little while, maybe, but that’s still much more than most people will ever do,” he replies sagely. “Tea?” he directs at me, already moving to grab a cup out of the dish rack.

“Umー yes please.” I sweep my gaze over the room, wanting to ask where Pippa and Popchik are, when something I’d completely missed the night before jumps out at meー Cosmo’s basket, or the lack thereof, where it once stood by the stove.

“Ah,” says Hobie, when he sees me staring at the empty spot, “Yes, there you goー our old mutt, Cosmo,” he tacks on for Boris’s sake. “Deaf as a haddock, having three or four seizures a week but still we wanted him to live forever. I blubbed like a baby. If you’d told me Welty was going to go before Cosmoー he spent half his life carrying that dog to the vet….”

Hobie’s voice tapers off in an oddly clogged sort of way that pulls sharply at my gut, even more so than the usual spectral pang of guilt I feel at the mention of Welty. I’m spared from having to scrape up a bumbling response, though, by Pippa bursting into the kitchen with Popchyk on his leash, layered in a green wool hat and many scarves.

“Okay,” she laughs, flushed from the cold, “What’s wrong with this dog? Has he never seen a car?”

“Maybe two or three ever before this,” Boris answers, untouched by the lock jawed, brain-stalled stupor I’m under. “Where we lived, it was all desertー only sand, far as your eye can see! That is all he knows. Isn’t that right, _ poustyshka? _” he directs the last part at Popchyk, who’s trotted over to sit at his feet in that hopeful-for-food dog manner. 

“That explains a lot,” Pippa says as she unwinds her scarves from around her neck. “He was yowling like a cat. I mean, a cab would go by andー whoo! In the air! I was flying him like a kite! People were laughing their heads off.”

“Poor thing must be getting the scare of his life,” Hobie remarks with a poorly-concealed smile, tossing a scrap of crust onto the floor for Popchik to gobble up. 

Pippa hangs the leash on a wall hook. “I was thinking it would be good to give him a bath, if someone wants to help?” 

A sliver of a scene flashes through my mindー kneeling at the clawfoot tub with Pippa, laughing as a sudsy Popper shakes water everywhere. Should I offer? 

“I can help,” Boris says instead, lazily shifting his hand to cover a yawn. “Potter needs to eat.” Startled, I realize I haven’t yet touched the toast in front of me. He takes a huge gulp from his cup of tea before he stands, scooping Popchik up as he goes.

Pippa seems to have no objections. “So what did I miss after Saudi Arabia?” She asks Boris, a bright smile on her face as she leads him out the kitchen doorway with that grasshopper-light hitch in her step.

“Ah, the best part, favorite place in the whole world! New Guinea…” their voices trail off down the hall while I’m left floundering, unnerved by the quick, genuine way they’ve taken to each other. I can’t even begin to touch on the murky feeling that the thought of them alone together inspires.

“Fascinating lad,” Hobie says, and with a start my attention darts back to the man in front of me. He’s shaking his head with the same sort of fondness I already witnessed in Pippa, and I’m relievedー beyond relieved to know that he actually _ likes _ Boris.

I’m suddenly bubbling with so many things I want to say to Hobie, and none of the wherewithal to say it.

“I’m sorry,” I end up blurting out. 

“Sorry?” He blinks at me like I’d asked him for directions to a place he wasn’t sure how to get to. “Whatever for?”

I bite my lip and stare down at my toast. “For showing up out of the blue like this, I meanー it’s a _ lot _ to ask of you, I know, andー all I can think to say is thank you, but it doesn’t feel like enoughー”

Hobie is already trying to placate me, his hand coming up to bat away my words as if he were shooing a fly from the table, but I’ve knocked my gears into _ relentless babbling _mode and I’m unable to stop.

“ーit’s just, we have nowhere to go, and I just need to figure out what we’re going to doー”

“All right, all right, steady now.” Hobie pushes my mug of tea into my hands, and I manage to take a sip; it’s warm, fragrant, just right. 

He leans back in his chair. “Theoー” he looks at me over his half-moon glasses. “How old are you?”

I have to force down my next swallow of tea. “Fifteen. Fifteen and a half.” 

“Andー” he seems to be working around how to ask itー “what about your grandfather?”

“Oh,” I say, helplessly. Somehow I hadn’t expected him to ask that.

“You’ve spoken to him? He knows you’ve nowhere to go?” 

“Wellー” My heart is picking up speed. “I mean, I don’t know if he has Alzheimer’s or what, but when they called him he didn’t even ask to speak to me.”

“So,” Hobie leans his his chin heavily in his hand and eyes me like a skeptical school teacher, “you didn’t speak to him.”

“Noーbut, when Xandra’s friend calledー” Lisa, who had followed me around the house until I coughed up my grandfather’s phone number, “Dorothyー my grandpa’s wife answered, andー they didn’t even care that my dad died. It was like, thank you for calling, we appreciate it, bye. I mean, my dad hated Grandpa Decker, and he hated Dorothy even moreー”

Hobie moves to shush me again, but my spiking panic is driving me forward. “And, and last time, Mrs. Barbour didn’t think it was a…suitable arrangement.”

That gives Hobie pause. “Last time?” 

I feel my heart in my throat. I have to gulp around it to whisper, “After...my mother died.” 

Hobie’s brow softens up a bit, and I urge myself to keep going. “They contacted Grandpa Decker, of course, and...eventually, they agreed to put me up in a hotel near them.”

I can see the confusion in Hobie’s frown. “For a visit?”

“No, as like…a permanent living situation. Or until I was eighteen, I guess.” I remember how I felt, hearing that the first time. Thinking it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. 

Hobie is silent, but his features twist into something more troubled. I’m encouraged enough to add, “I don’t think even that would be on the table anymoreー now that Boris is with me, and everything.”

I realize my mistake as soon as Hobie’s expression shifts. “That’s another matter we need to discuss.” He’s back to his serious demeanor in a flash, and I tumble down from the belief that I’d made any headway.

“He needs to call his father, to let him know he’s in one piece, if nothing else. No, noー Theo, I hope you can understand why I have to insist on it.”

The waves are rising up to lap at me once more. “Hobie, you don’tー that’s notー” as unlikely as it is that anything would come of a call to his father, the floodwaters of my desperation have whisked my rationality awayー replacing it with a vision of Mr. Pavlikovsky’s shadowed, wicked hand snatching the back of Boris’s shirt on a dark Vegas street, dragging him out of my reach. 

Or, still unlikely, but slightly more grounded in realityー a pale, shaky Boris hanging up the phone. _ I’m sorry Potter, I must go_.

“I know that Boris’s stories make it sound different, butー I mean, I thought _ my _ dad was the definition of alcoholic, but he had _ nothing _ on Mr. Pavlikovsky.” My voice fades to almost nothing as I speak my next words.

“The only time he even paid attention to Boris is when he was beating him.” 

Hobie’s brows shoot toward his hairline, and he reels back a little. The pit of my stomach clenches almost instantly, that deep-down queasiness when you know you’ve done something wrong. I’m breaking one of our unspoken rules. I’m telling Boris’s secret. Betraying his trust. 

At the same time, I feel I have no choice but to do it if I’m going to convince a stubborn Hobie. And I _ have _ to convince him.

“You knowー you know the scar he has? Right here?” I stumble on, tracing one of my fingers over my eyebrow; it’s something Hobie couldn’t have missed, conversing with Boris as long as he did. I don’t wait for an answer.

“I saw itー I was watching through the window when it happenedー his father hit him with his cane, likeー” my muddled words fail me, so I mime swinging something with my fist. “And blood was just, _ pouring _ downー” I sweep my hand over my face, right before Hobie waves his own in a rather urgent _ stop _ motion.

“All right, good lord!” His expression is perhaps as disturbed as I’ve ever seen it.

“He can’t call his dad, Hobie,” I plead, balling my fists in my lap. “_ Please_.”

Hobie leans back again, dumbfounded. “For God’s sake, I’m not advocating to send the boy back toー something like _ that. _” He sits for a long, still moment. I wait, hardly daring to breathe, until Hobie finally scrubs a hand over his face, gruff and weary.

“But there _ are _ things to consider...legal ramifications, if his father comes looking for himー”

“He won’t.”

I jump in my seat, sloshing tea all over my toast. Boris is in the doorway, the sopping sleeves of his sweater pushed up to his elbows. Shit, how long has he been standing there? 

His face is resigned, matter-of-fact. “He already left for Australia.” 

What?

“Without you?” Hobie asks, brow pinched with concern. Boris nods, a quick one-two. 

“Honestly, there are times he almost forgot me, but I always chased him.” The bitter edge of his shrug speaks the truth. “This time, I did not.” 

Hobie brings a hand up to rub his chin in an almost scholarly sort of way. “Any other family?”

Boris shakes his head, gazing down at the floor. His skinny arms hang at his sides. “Dead. Or gone, anyway.” 

Hobie grows even more sober, if that were possible. “Nobody else at all here in the States?”

There’s a moment of hesitation. Boris meets my eyes, just a second or two, before looking at Hobie. “I have Theo,” he says quietly. 

The plain sincerity of it lands a kick square to my chest, makes it ache. A phantom image rises in my mind like mistー struggling through darkness, punching Boris’s number again and again. I sneak an anxious glance at Hobie, worried he’s able to discern the layers of meaning there. As it is, he looks altogether lost for words.

“Well then,” he says eventually, sounding neither firm nor decisive. 

“My mother’s lawyer is here. In the city,” I spout suddenly, and Hobie’s bewildered attention snaps to me. “Not a lawyer lawyerー one that handles money. I talked to him on the phone, before I left? Will you come with me to see him?”

It takes Hobie a moment to surface from whatever fog he’s under. “What? Yes, ohー of course I’ll go with you to see your solicitor. That’s no trouble.” He seems to come fully back to himself then.

“Let’s stop worrying for now, shall we? The details can wait. Don’t look at me like that, you twoー nobody’s getting the boot, as it were. Come on, it’ll all be fine.” He shoos us out of the kitchen to start cleaning up, after making absolutely sure I don’t want anything else for breakfast in the stead of my ruined toast.

“Mister Hobie is a good man,” Boris announces as we make our way down the hall, soft and serious. I can hear the distinct whir of a hair dryer the closer we get to the bathroom.

I want to ask if he heard everything I said to Hobie. Instead I ask, “Your dad didn’t really leave already, did he?”

Boris gives a disaffected shrug. “He will soon enough, so is not really a lie. And he won’t look for me, that’s for damn sure.” 

“He’s almost done!” Pippa calls over the noise from within the bathroom as we pass the open door. 

“Good onya, Pippi!” Boris calls back, a turbid reminder of their team dog-washing adventure. It’s a bad mix with the guilt and anxiety still churning in my gut.

“Would you stop calling her Pippi? That’s not her name,” I snap as I duck into the spare room. Harsher than I intended, considering I didn’t intend to say anything at all. Boris halfway closes the door behind him, shooting me a look that would chastise me, if he had the ability to do so.

“I know that. Is a _ nickname. _ All in good fun!” he says. “What, next I should stop calling you _ Potter? _” 

_ No_, I don’t say. With a sigh, he moves to his coat slung over his suitcase. “I’m dying for a smoke, my God.” 

I am too, in fact, butー “We can’t smoke in here,” I tell Boris, who’s already fished out his pack of cigarettes and lighter. He pauses, looking at me strangely.

“Why? Mister Hobie smokes.”

I’m snared, suddenly, in our different wavelengths; tangled up in how to impress on him that we’re in the Normal World now_ , _ with a normal adult who gives a shitー and my stomach-knotting need to be on my best behavior so Hobie doesn’t find a reason to give us the _ boot _, despite his assurances.

I grit my teeth, frustrated with my jumbled words and thoughts and feelings. “Yeah, but _ we’re _not old enough to, and he cares about that kind of thing. Justー don’t do it in here, where he could see.”

Boris gives me another long lookー a look that says _you_ _stupid asshole_. In the end he rolls his eyes, glances off to the side, and promptly lights up again.

“Ha!” he says, hurrying over to window. The spare room is situated on an alley side, and thus has an old fire escape attached to the outside wall. Boris gets to work prying the window open.

“Lucky for us, yah?” he inches it up enough to slip out onto the rusty platform waiting for him. 

It is pretty damn lucky, actually. I watch the movements of his hunched form as Boris sticks a cigarette in his mouth, flicks the lighterー my lungs prickle with longing when he exhales a plume of smoke into the frigid air. I make the decision to climb out there and join him just as our door swings fully open, startling me.

“All clean,” Pippa declares as she steps in, presenting a cotton-white Popper. Of course; how did I forget that she was so nearby?

Before I can speak a word, Pippa’s brows draw together in confusion. “I thought Boris was in here too?” she wonders, peering back out into the hallway as if she’d missed him in passing.

“Uhー” My brain lurches in a hasty panic, scrambling for a way to distract her from the window. Boris, of course, ruins any efforts I might have made by waving from his perch on the fire escape in clear view.

“Oh, there he is,” Pippa says, unaware of my distress. Just like her casual judgement the night before, the shame that had practically become a stranger to me rears up to sink its claws in at the thought of her knowing the things I do now, the things I _ am _ now: dirty, delinquent, broken.

She must misinterpret the trepidation on my face. “Don’t worry, I won’t tell Hobie.” she’s wearing an expression that practically screams _ duh_.

“Ohー thanks,” I manage, lamely. Why are my words constantly drying up in my mouth? Why can’t I think of anything to say?

“See, Potter?” Boris’s voice floats in through the cracked window, “You worry too much!”

Pippa kneels down to scratch Popchik’s head. “Why does he call you Potter, anyway?” she asks, amusement alight in her eyes. The raised line of scar tissue is just visible over the curve of her ear.

A few seconds hedge by before I process the question.

“Um, becauseー” I point to my glasses. “Harry Potter.”

“Oh.” Her mouth pinches into a dimpled line, clearly holding back laughter. 

_ Stop acting like a fucking dipshit, _ I berate myself, something oddly resolute behind it. _ Just breathe. _

I do. In, out. And finally, I let my mouth go before the words can trip over themselves in my head.

“Yeah yeah, laugh it up,” I grumble, and that’s all it takes to get Pippa genuinely laughing through her crumbling restraint. A swell of relief rushes over me at itー the simple rituals of camaraderie haven't been completely lost to me after all. I just need to put it back into use, like a traveler brushing the dust off his mother tongue after years immersed in a foreign land. 

“I’m sorry,” Pippa gets out between giggles, “butー now that you said itー I can’t unsee it.”

Her gusts of laughter have a self-propelling recklessness I know all too well from wild nights with Boris, an edge of giddiness and hysteria that I associate (in myself, anyway) with having narrowly missed death. It reminds me of that ever-present thing lurking beneath the surface when I see Pippaー broken though I am, so is she. In many of the same ways. 

“You and every kid in Las Vegas, apparently,” I say with a twist of a grin. I wonder how much she remembersー does she have nightmares too? Crowd fears? Sweats and panics? Does she ever have the sense of observing herself from afar, as I often do, as if the explosion had knocked my body and my soul into two separate entities that remain about six feet apart from each other?

It isn’t the kind of thing you can ask, but still I want to know. Another time, maybe. 

Popper, vexed by the lapse in attention paid to him, yaps at Pippa. “Oh, you need lots of love, don’t you? Yes you do,” she coos, giving him a few strokes down his back. “I love dogs. I have a big dog book and I memorized every breed there is. He’s a Maltese, right?”

I nod right as a red-nosed Boris makes his swift re-entry into the room, hustling through the window and slamming it shut behind him. “Fucking brass monkey weather,” he mutters, pulling the sleeves of his sweater down over his hands and hugging his arms to his chest. 

I glare at himー _ watch your mouth, jackass_ー but Pippa simply laughs again, unperturbed. “_What _weather?”

“Cold as hell weather, Pippi!” Boris exclaims. “Catch our death weather!” He stomps back over to his coat to stash away his smokes again. “Swear to God you will be saying your final _ goodbye _ to me in the morning.” 

Pippa tries to be gracious, I notice, and hide her grin at his dramatics behind her hand. I give Boris no such courtesy.

“He also thinks ice in your water glass will make you sick, just to, like, put this in perspective,” I tell Pippa, earning a stifled chortle from her and a withering glance from Boris himself.

“Sure, funny now, _ haha_,” he bites, throwing himself down onto the creaky mattress. “Won’t be so funny when you’re lying in hospital bed, up to your arse in needles.”

“That _ does _ sound awful,” Pippa agrees solemnly, although the effect is somewhat ruined by her now-unrestrained smirk.

The whole situation of Pippa and Boris, Boris and Pippa is still toeing the border of utterly surrealー but now that I’m no longer a befuddled spectator on the other side of the chummy, featherweight atmosphere between them, I feel something within me settle just a fraction, warm and nameless.

I can almost say it’s..._ nice. _

I don’t notice Hobie’s appearance in the doorway until he politely raps on the frame, catching our attention. “Sorry to interrupt,” he says, with enough levity to loosen one of the knots in my stomach. “I wanted to remind you to finish up your packing, Pips. We don’t want a mad dash in the morning.”

I think about it the next day, pressed shoulder to shoulder with Boris out on the fire escape after we’ve said our goodbyes to Pippa (a gifting of origami frogs from her, an exchange of phone numbers between she and Borisー something I’m welcome to, Pippa says, once I obtain my own phone). It’s not a feeling I’ve had luck examining so far; I wouldn’t call it hope, exactly. But us, here, Hobieー a future that isn’t scrounging for survival on the streets begins to unfurl in my mind, cautious.

Down at the mouth of the alley I catch a glimpse of Pippa’s scalding red hair and Hobie’s large, well-dressed form as they hurry down around the corner to hail a cab. Boris follows my line of sight. 

“You gonna miss her?” He asks, blowing smoke out the side of his mouth. He isn’t looking at me, which makes it near impossible to discern the purpose behind his question. If there is one at all.

I take a drag from my cigarette, lingering over the answer. My feelings for Pippa are such a mucked-up entanglement of disarray I’m not sure I could explain it even if I wanted to. How do I categorize _ miss, _ anyway? Something flits through my headー a white coat just out of my reach. Boris’s face vanishing from view on a dark road. 

“Yeah, I guess,” I finally answer with a shrug. Shouldn’t I? I want to see her again, I know that much. 

Whether or not it was the answer Boris was looking for, it seems to be good enough; he gives a noncommittal hum, reaching out to tap ash over the railing. When he looks at me again, I see a familiar glint of mischief in his black eyes. 

“Okay Potter, tell usー where do we go to get a fucking drink around here?”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this fic now has a playlist! listen [here](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0MG2DiLe6HkMBNpvecmHf4?si=1ih-RRw2RvKGVmkHrykX-A)

“Well well,” says Mr. Bracegirdle as he shakes Hobie’s hand and then mine. “Theodoreー I do have to sayー you’re growing up to look a good deal like your mother. I wish she could see you now.”

I try to meet his eye and not seem embarrassed. The truth is, though I have my mother’s straight hair and something of her light-and-dark coloring, I look a whole lot more like my father. Not that I’d ever been happy about it, resembling the parent I couldn’t stand, but to see a younger version of his sulky, drunk-driving face in the mirror is doubly upsetting now that he’s dead.

The impatient energy I’ve been filled with since my initial call to Mr. Bracegirdle’s office several days ago is already slipping away for apprehension to rise in its place. I’ve been so eager to get the issue of money cleared up in hopes that our financial independence would further ease any reservations Hobie might have about us staying with him, I neglected the fact that I don’t have any idea what to do here.

While Hobie and Mr. Bracegirdle chat in a subdued way, my mind wanders back to Boris in the waiting room, where we’d left him folded into one of the chairs with a worn paperback, studiously avoiding the receptionist’s eye. Although there wasn’t technically a reason for him to come along, I was afraid to push my luck with Hobie’s generosity by asking to leave a practical stranger alone in his houseー not to mention the chances that Boris, left to his own devices, might carelessly rummage through my suitcase for something or other were much too high for my own comfort.

Beyond that, the thought of being so far removed from Boris doesn’t sit right in me anymoreー I’d never admit it out loud, but the anxiety threaded through my chest starts to thrum whenever he’s out of my sight too long now. And that’s just within the walls of Hobie’s cozy, cluttered home. As ridiculous as it is, some splintered, frantic part of me is convinced I’ll return to the waiting room to find him gone, vanished into thin air, a figment of my addled imagination.

“Well, Theodore,” Mr. Bracegirdle says, calling me back to myself. “You’re old enough that a judge would consider your wishes above all in this matter, especially since your guardianship would be uncontestedー of course,” he says to Hobie, “we could seek a temporary guardianship for the upcoming interlude, but I don’t think that will be necessary. Clearly this arrangement is in the minor’s best interests, as long as it’s alright with you?” 

“That and more,” says Hobie. “I’m happy if he’s happy.”

“You’re fully prepared to act in an informal capacity as Theodore’s adult custodian for the time being?”

“Informal, black tie, whatever’s called for,” Hobie answers, “as long as it’ll do the job for the important thingsー medical, school, other legalities?”

Hobie isn’t only asking for my sake, I know; we’d agreed in not so many words not to mention Boris outright, for a number of reasons, myself worried that Mr. Bracegirdle wouldn’t be so willing to overlook the status of a runaway immigrant, and Hobie muddled with heaps of adult concerns I only in theory understand the importance of (_My visa is good for one year and three months more, Mister Hobie, I swear it, _ Boris had earnestly reassured the day before).

“No need to worry,” Mr. Bracegirdle waves off breezily, “I can scarcely think of a situation where your authority would be called into question, especially with an uncontested guardianshipー and if someone _ does _give you grief, just put a call in to my office and I’ll sort you out.”

He switches gears, then, so quickly that I’m caught completely off guard. “There’s your schooling to look after as well,” he directs at me. “We’d spoken of boarding school, as I recall. But that seems a lot to think of now, doesn’t it?” he says, noting the stricken look on my face. Out of the entire unmitigated disaster that had been my father’s money siphoning plot, I never thought _ that _particular bit would come back to bite me in the ass.

“Shipping you out just as you’ve arrived, and with the holidays coming up? No need to make any decisions at all at the moment, I shouldn’t think,” Mr. Bracegirdle continues, with a glance to Hobie. 

Before I can say a word, his gaze returns to me. “And this is definitely what you want?” He’s looking at me keenly with an expression that makes me feel like I’m on the witness stand. “To be at Mister Hobart’s for the next few weeks?” 

I don’t like the sound of _ the next few weeks. _“Yes,” I say, “butー”

“Becauseー boarding school.” Mr. Bracegirdle folds his hands and leans back in his chair. “Almost certainly the best thing for you in the long term but quite frankly, given the situation, I believe I could telephone my friend Sam Ungerer at Buckfield and we could get you up there right now. I think it would be possible to arrange for you to stay in the home of the headmaster or one of the teachers rather than the dormitory, so you could be in more of a family setting, if that’s something you’d like.” 

This has spiraled far out of my grasp in the blink of an eye; my skittish heart rears against my chest as my palms go clammy. Boarding school is rock bottom on my own list of options anyway, but now? With Boris? Impossible. No way. I can’t say that, though, not to Mr. Bracegirdle.

“Well,” Hobie interjects mildly in the wake of my petrified silence, “like you said, no need to rush anything for now.” 

“...Alright,” Mr. Bracegirdle concedes after a pause, “As long as this is what you want, and Mister Hobart’s amenable, I see nothing wrong with this arrangement for the time being. But I do urge you to think about where you’d like to be, Theodore, so we can go ahead and work out something for the next school term or maybe even summer school, if you’d like.”

  
  
  


It’s the only thing I _ can _ think about, afterward. Hobie, affable as always, treats us to lunch; it does the trick to cure Boris of his cold-weather sourness, but I can’t manage to match his level of plain enjoyment with Mr. Bracegirdle’s conversation circling around my mind.

_ Is _it such a problem for meー usー to stay in the city? The insistence with which Mr. Bracegirdle pressed the idea of boarding school on me is rattling, frankly; does he know something I don’t? Did Hobie give some sort of indication that he isn’t alright with anything more than a short-term situation?

If that’s the case, what are we going to do? 

It continues to vex me on our way back to the Village, and for the rest of the dayー enough that even Boris mentions it later, crouched together on the fire escape for our after-dinner smoke. 

“So what happened?” he asks, knocking his shoulder into mine when I don’t respond. “Lawyer man not gonna give you the money?” 

“It’s not that,” I mumble, staring out at the worn brick across the alley; I press down on my cigarette between my numb fingers. “He wants to ship me off to boarding school.”

Boris snorts immediately, a wisp of smoke escaping with it. “You told him to fuck off, right?” 

Despite my disquieted mood, I grin. “Yeah, that would really help my case.” I reach out to tap ash over the railing. “I didn’t tell him I would, but…he acted like I’m this huge burden to Hobie, and he doesn’t even _ know _ the part about you. And, I don’t know, maybe Hobie agrees.”

Boris plucks his cigarette from his mouth with his long fingers. “Mister Hobie has been good to us so far. Doesn’t seem to mind.”

“Because Hobie _ is _ good.” I draw my arms to my body against a frigid gust of wind. ”He wouldn’t want to, like, tell us upfront to get the hell out of his house.”

In that maddeningly blasé way of his, Boris shrugs. “Ask him, then. Honestly.” 

I shoot Boris a look between disbelief and consternation. That’s the thing I’m afraid of: clear-cut, unambiguous confirmation that we’re not welcome. 

Boris is able to read me, of course, and he huffs in frustration. “Look, Potter, if he says we can stay? Good, great! If he says we must leave? Well, now we know.”

“And if he _ does _ tell us to leave?” I mutter.

“Then we figure out something else,” Boris answers, simple as that. He flicks his cigarette butt down to the alley below and jams his hands into the folds of his coat. “Fuckin’ freezing out here.”

I stub out the remnants of my cigarette too, both infuriated by and envious of Boris’s total lack of concern for our fate. In a lot of ways I wish I could take the laissez-faire approach he does, though I’m starting to suspect the deep rut of worry my brain is trapped in might be permanent.

Even so, I do feel a little more grounded now than I did earlier, with nicotine seeping into my bloodstream and the solid presence of Boris pressed along my arm.

After I shower and change, I push Boris to do the same with the promise of making tea while he does. In my paranoia over Hobie being able to smell smoke on us, I’ve been coercing Boris into almost nightly showersー which he’s relented to, shockingly enough, with just a token amount of bickering and protest. I make my way down to the kitchen to start the kettle only to find Hobie there, already a step ahead of me.

He glances up from the basket housing his tea collection. “Ah, Theo. Would you boys like some? I just put the water on.”

“Yes please,” I say, sliding into one of the kitchen chairs as he pulls two more mugs from the dish rack and sets them on the counter. He’s wearing his old workshop corduroysー where he’s been for the last hour or soー which means he must have reached his stopping point for the night. 

“I’m working on an old Bergére down in the shop,” Hobie begins conversationally, dropping a tea bag into each mug, “and I could really use a hand in reupholstering it tomorrow. What do you say?” 

I perk up instantly; in the week we've been staying with Hobie I haven’t been down in the shop for more than a passing minute. It was one of the things I had sorely missed, dreamed about out in the Vegas wastes. “Yeah, I’d like that,” I nearly stutter in my eagerness, “I’d like that a lot.”

He glances over at me after stashing the tea basket away with his warm Hobie-smile. “Then it’s settled.” 

There’s an almost imperceptible shift in the air as Hobie ambles over to the kitchen table, one I don’t pick up on until he settles into the chair opposite me. His expression is thoughtful, careful even. “I’d like to ask you something, if you don’t mind.”

Any giddiness that had bubbled up within me quickly pops; I hate how the mere suggestion of a line of questioning sets off my nerves like a gunshot.

Hobie loosely folds his hands together on the table. “You seemed...troubled, earlier today, by Mr. Bracegirdle’s suggestions.” He peers at me over his half-moon glasses, and I try not to visibly gulp.

Where is this leading? How should I field this? “Wellー it’s just thatー boarding school is, well…” 

Hobie puts a gentle palm up to halt my anxious babbling. “I’m not trying to put you on the spot, Theo. I’m only looking for your honest thoughts on the matter. From what it looked like, you weren’t too keen on it.”

The potential consequences of _ honesty _are still weighing my mind down, but after a moment’s hesitation I give a small nod. 

Hobie leans back a bit. “The issue of Boris complicates the whole thing a great deal too, doesn’t it?” 

My eyes dart up from the tablecloth; that Hobie knows it shouldn’t be a surprise, it’s obvious enough, and yet I can’t help but feel a little exposed, like I’m again stepping out into the cold air in my insufficient layers. 

Boris’s words from earlier sink into me with a bit more understanding now. I’ve only been delaying the inevitable up to this pointー how much good does it do to skirt a problem Hobie is already well aware of?

I fiddle with my hands in my lap. “...Even if it were possibleー” which it isn’t, in all likelihood, ”ーhe’d never go. Or never _ stay _, at least.”

Hobie hums, crossing his arms over his chest like he’d expected something of the sort. “I suppose there isn’t any use in worrying over what Boris might do if you went upstate, then. You two are determined to stick together like glue, I can see that much.” He says it almost as if he’s pondering to himself, unaware of my suddenly burning cheeks.

I feel physically knocked off-kilter at Hobie’s assessment. I never even considered what Hobie quite reasonably did: that Boris and I might need to separate, somehow. Impossible, like holding a hopelessly knotted ball of yarn in my hands and being asked to untangle it. Whatever happens, whatever we do, either both of us are in on it or neither of us are. That wasー _ is _ー the only option to me.

Even if that means leaving the comfort and safety of Hobie’s home.

Hobie himself seems to have drifted off into thought; I wrestle with my jittery limbs, my heavy heart, wanting to steel myself for the metaphorical blow that’s surely coming. _ Then we figure out something else, _Boris had said.

I startle a bit when, after what has to be a whole minute or two, Hobie heaves a great sigh through his nose. It has a sense of finality about it, the heft of a decision made once and for all.

“Well, who needs Buckfield, anyway? There are plenty of fine schools here in the city.” 

Of all the things I was prepared to hear, _ that _ certainly wasn’t high on the list, and I flounder a little.

“Butー that would meanー” Is Hobie really saying what I think he’s saying? I can’t let myself believe it.

Hobie’s fond smile sends a pang of hope through me though, despite myself. “I meant it when I said it. You have a place here for as long as you need or want it. Both of you.” 

I’m speechlessー although this is the outcome I was desperately wishing for, I somehow convinced myself it wouldn’t happen, so afraid was I that Hobie would decide taking in two grubby teenage drifters wasn’t worth the hassle. 

I’m not sure what to do with myself. “Thank you, Hobie,” I manage to get out of my constrained throat. “We won’t cause you any trouble, I swearー”

Hobie cuts me off with a wave of his hand. “Come on, none of that now,” he admonishes, though anything else he has to say is interrupted by the piercing whistle of the kettle. 

He hops up to take it off the heat while I sit there in a daze, wading a sea of disbelief and gratitude. _ Don’t make him regret giving you a chance_, something in the back of my head whispers, which in the moment seems unthinkable. Of course I won’t, how could I?

I should have known, even back then, not to make promises that I couldn’t keep.

  
  
  


Even with our place in Hobie’s home apparently secured, I’m still determined to prove ourselves worthy of it, so over the next few weeks I throw myself into a flurry of activity. I research schools to attendー realizing quickly enough that any of the more prestigious establishments would take one look at Boris’s school records (and, likely, my own) and laugh. Schools requiring entrance exams are a hard sell to Boris, and he’s also entirely against the idea of private school.

“Potter, what’s the point of spending heaps of money on something we can get for free?” he says, with no small amount of disdain. “Just to have the great honor of being in same building with the _ bourgeoisie _? Bah.” 

In our current situation, I have to agree with him. The likelihood of us both securing scholarships at the same institution is slim to none, and I can’t afford to spend the bulk of my inheritance on high school tuition. My search, therefore, boils down to _ public school with two vacant spots halfway through the school year _. Which is, in New York, a tall order all on its own. 

I put the living stipend Mr. Bracegirdle gave me to good use; I make vet appointments for Popchyk and dental appointments for myselfー which Boris refuses to have any part of, and I don’t push it. Hobie won’t accept grocery money but we go grocery shopping anyway, bringing back fresh produce and baked goods from the farmers’ market at Union Square that seem to please him.

I’m also able to take us out to replace our ratty wardrobe, something that Boris is a bit more enthusiastic about. We start by heading over to the L Train on First Avenueー though Boris isn’t picky about where his clothes come from, I think a thrift shop is more his pace. We find plenty of what we need, coats and sweaters and pants and shoes, including boots similar in style but in much better condition than Boris’s current pair, plus the _ pièce de résistance _ of Boris’s entire haulー a black leather bomber jacket lined with real fleece and adorned with more straps and buckles than could possibly serve a functional purpose. After that I take us up to the nearest Old Navy for the more banal essentialsー cheap layers, socks, underwearー before returning home with our spoils.

Another thing Boris refuses to take part in with me is a haircut, though he agrees to tag along the next day. We ride the bus up into Midtown, where things are more familiar to me, and I end up leaving Boris happily sipping a mocha latte in a Starbucks down the street from the salon I duck into. _ He’ll still be there when you get back_, I have to tell the tense, restless part of myself more than once. 

I don’t think I truly realized just how long I’d let my hair grow or how passively I had accepted my scraggly appearance until most of it is sheared off and styled away from my face. I almost don’t recognize myself in the mirror when it’s doneー the unkempt delinquent of the Nevada desert has been clipped down and brushed out of existence, replaced by someone who isn’t quite my old self either. It leaves me feeling strangely unsettled. 

When I shoulder my way back into Starbucks I see that Boris is, in fact, slouched in the armchair right where I left him, wrapped in his new jacket with his knobby knees splayed apart. His head is turned to the window beside him, and I’m unexpectedly struckー Boris in New York, Boris in _ New York_, not begging for change on the street like I’d fleetingly imagined for us but calmly people-watching in a Starbucks on East Fifty-Second, like I’d often done with Andy. He takes an absent swallow from his cup as I approach, the white column of his throat bobbing with it; a second later his gaze darts to me, and his eyebrows shoot up to his hairline.

“What?” I snap after a few moments, his silence tugging at the thread of self-consciousness within me. I resist the urge to run my fingers through my hair and muss it up. “Fuck you, it’s not _ that _ bad.” 

Boris shakes himself then, in a way that‘s reminiscent of Popchyk in the bath. “The ghost of two-years-ago Potter appears in front of me and I am not allowed to be surprised even a little?” he protests, hand to his chest. I roll my eyes, but my hackles settle back down almost as quickly as they rose. 

“Come on,” I say, dropping the subject. “There’s one more thing we need to do.”

Since we’re in Midtown already I figure I’ll check off the last big-ticket items on my list, a laptop in preparation for school and an iPhone for each of us, which Boris is ecstatic over. “Why did we not run sooner?” he grins on the bus home, and I know he’s only joking, but it sparks an echo of my dad’s anguished howls in my head, a whip of dry desert wind on my face, and suddenly I feel nothing but heavy, curdled guilt over the bag of electronics in my lap.

  
  
  


Other than these few outings, in the weeks leading up to Christmas we mostly stick around the Village. In the face of my refusal to “borrow” any of Hobie’s belongings, Boris exercises his wily talent for acquiring the things we wantー he somehow finds a corner shop a few blocks away run by an old man who doesn’t card for cigarettes, and though I’m wary of Boris’s plan to hit up the local liquor stores, my craving for the comforting burn of alcohol wins out in the end.

“You never go to same place twice in a row, that’s the trick,” Boris sagely informs me. We’ve figured out about three or four different stores we can rotate, which is the first important thing, according to Boris. He also claims he can sniff out who is and isn’t an undercover cop, the part that by far makes me the most nervous, but our missions of seeking out apathetic bums or no-shits-given college kids are mostly a success. It’s not free or nearly as plentiful as Mr. Pavlikovsky’s supply was, but it’s something.

We also spend a lot of time down in the workshop; I’m thrilled to be helping Hobie again, and though Boris has approximately zero interest in learning the pore and luster of different woods, or what to do for water damage, or how to spot a reproduction from the real deal, he does take a liking to the stories Hobie tells, which are plentiful: the history of the pieces, the people and places behind them, with Hobie’s own tales thrown into the mix. Boris almost always has questions to spare, which delights Hobie enough that soon these workshop anecdotes branch off into all sorts of topics between them. 

In fact, there’s almost no stopping them when the vast breadth of Hobie’s knowledge intersects with the fiery, hungry edges of Boris’s ownー they talk Chekhov and Dostoevsky over dinner, have lessons on obscure English words at breakfast, take winding philosophical sojourns down in the shop while Hobie coats chairs with linseed oil; Marx and Lenin, the Greeks, Thoreau and Déjacque and Nietzsche and plenty of others I’d never heard of or paid attention to. I tend to tune out most of these conversations to pleasant background noise, especially when they reach modern politics. Still, some uneasy inner part of me melts with relief at how well they’ve taken to each other.

In fact, other parts of me begin to unwind too, slowly but surely. Hobie insists on splitting the duty of calling around schools with me, tempering some of my stress there; Boris manages to convince me that, with Hobie’s penchant for smoking in the kitchen and all, he’ll never trace anything back to us if we keep it out of sight; Hobie cooks and we wash the dishes; or, if he’s going out with one of his endless parade of old society friends, he makes sure we have dinner plans of our own. 

There _ is _ the instance of Hobie offering Pippa’s room to one of us, since she’s away the majority of the year, and I have to awkwardly turn it down. _ It just wouldn’t feel right, taking over her space, _I bumble, hoping it doesn’t sound like a lieー which it isn’t, mostly. Everything else, though, is smooth sailing. Boris and I eat until our stomachs hurt, we take walks with a skittish Popper, we bring haphazard armfuls of laundry to the washing machine and huddle for smoke breaks out on the fire escape and drink our contraband beers on the floor of Welty’s room after Hobie is asleep, being careful to hide the empty bottles until we can sneak them outside to the trash. 

The old door to our room doesn’t latch properly so we’ve taken to shoving an iron doorstop under it to hold it shut, and Hobie _ is _ the type to knock first, anyway, so I’ve relaxed a fraction about our nights spent wrapped around each other. Sometimes there’s nothing I’m more grateful for than Boris’s arm anchored to my waist when I awake to the specter of my father sitting in the room, disappearing in the blink of an eye; other times, lying in bed together before sleep claims us feels like we’re dangling on the cavernous ledge of all the things still unsaid between us, and all I can do is silently beg Boris _ don’t jump, don’t jump_ー sometimes the anticipation of it drives me so crazy that _ I _almost want to jump first, just to get it over with. I always drift off before it happens, though. 

All in all, I can certainly call myself _ content_, since I won’t allow myself the other word. Boris seems jolly enough too, as he always is when he has food and company, but as our survival becomes less of an immediate concern, I start to think about all the other things I promised him hereー things I want to show him, share with him, things we haven’t even touched on, for all our wandering around. 

About a week before Christmas Hobie starts in with great enthusiasm on planning our feast, poring over cookbooks and scribbling shopping lists for himself. With the gratuitous amount of bakeries at our disposal he puts us in charge of dessertー _ anything you want, boys, whatever you pick will be deliciousー _ and with that, an idea starts to form in my mind.

On the 23rd we brave the crowded streets and hop on the subway to, as far as Boris knows, carry out our dessert mission. Which we _ are_, just not where he expects. And, truthfully, I’m a little nervous, as I’ve never been to Greenpoint myself, but I’ve heard enough about the Polish bakeries there that I’m hopeful it’ll all be worth it. 

Boris starts to get suspicious long before our forty minute journey is over. “Where are we going that’s so far, Potter?” he grouches, “there’s that fucking fancy _ pâttiserie _ down the street from Mister Hobie’s, even.” 

“This isー well, I _ hope _this is a little more special than that,” is all I answer. 

Getting off at Greenpoint Avenue, it only takes a short walk for shop signs to start changing from English, and soon it’s pretty clear why they call this place _ Little Poland_. Boris goes wide-eyed and quiet, darting his gaze around all the stores and bustling restaurants and mouthing silently to himself, turning his head this way and that to catch snatches of conversation. Everything I want to ask him dies in my throat before I even open my mouth. 

We run across a few different bakeries that look just fine to me, but I follow Boris as he circles the blocks again and again, seemingly in a daze of indecision. He finally chooses one of the smaller places, and though the deciding factor is completely lost to me, I don’t question it. The first thing that hits me when we file through the door is the scentー there’s of course a base of the fluffy, yeasty, fresh-baked bread smell tinged with sweetness that must be inherent to all bakeshops, but with a powerful overtone of unfamiliar spice mixtures and a certain tang that tells me, clearly, I’m foreign here. Next to me, I hear Boris’s inhale rather than see it.

There’s an older woman behind the counterー young grandmother, if I had to guessー who greets us placidly in accented English as we approach the dessert case (many more loaves and less of the cake shapes I’m used to, lighter on frosting and heavier on dried fruit as well); but when Boris, looking downright _ bashful _in a way I’d never seen him asks a soft question in Polish, the woman’s whole demeanor brightens. 

Suddenly there’s a stream of words I don’t understand, but Boris perks up too, and I watch their animated chat unfoldー I can’t follow a lick of it, except when Boris stutters and throws in an English word here and there, but I’m so distracted by the lively curve of his smile and the pink blush blooming on the bridge of his nose that I don’t mind a bit. 

Their conversation turns to the confectionery display, with Boris pointing to certain things and the woman pointing to others, and she’s soon taking out several different loaves and what I’m pretty sure is a cheesecake to wrap up and put next to the register, along with two mason jars of some darkish fruit preserves. I pay while Boris continues to talk, and at the last minute the woman tucks something into our bag; a clear plastic sack filled with shortbread-looking cookies, smeared with jam in the middle and folded almost like turnovers. 

“Come back soon, yes?” The woman switches to English just as we’re pushing our way out the door, and with that I know she’s including me too.

There’s a certain energy crackling in Boris’s step as we make our way back to the station, and for once he’s blissfully ignoring the slushy sidewalks and bitter wind and sun sinking low in the sky. “Ah, how nice she was! So nice! Missus Zieliński, said her name was. Never met a nicer lady in my life,” he rambles, swinging our bag of desserts at his side. “She even gave us free _ kołaczki!_”

I take a guess that he means the cookies. 

“Andー I knew my Polish is rusty, know that very well, but my God, I talked like a fucking fool!” Boris’s statement of seeming dismay is in contrast to the cheerful sigh he lets out, and again, I’m unable to pry my gaze away from him. I try to remember the times I’ve seen Boris at his happiestー Christmas with my dad and Xandra comes to mindー but even then, I don’t think I’ve ever seen him quite like _ this_. 

His cheeks are practically glowing with his blush, even in the dimming light, and his eyes are bright and sharp and the corners of his mouth keep turning up like he can’t fight back his smileーeverything about him is radiating a livewire vivacity, and I have to swallow down the abrupt, suckerpunch-solid _ ache _ in my chest at the sight of it.

Everything else be damned, I know I’ll never again regret begging Boris to come with me. Never.

“Well, now you have lots of places to practice,” I say as we round a corner off the busier street. The clamor behind us grows a little muffled. “We can come here whenever you want.” I can take him to the Lower East Side too, I know, along the Slavic strips of First and Second Avenue.

“....Yah,” Boris echoes after a beat. He slows to a stop in the shadow of the building we’re next to, turning to me with a look that kicks my heart into a strange stutter-and-thump. I hang there for a long moment, not daring to breathe, until Boris finally dips and bumps his shoulder into mine: _ thank you_.

I stay frozen even as he starts walking again, forcing me into a few hurried steps to catch up with him as I try to smother my pulse with my own embarrassment and alarm.

What the hell possessed me to think, even for a split second, that Boris might try to kiss me again?

  
  
  


“There’s some good news at last,” Hobie tells me after we return home and he marvels over our selection (_we used to have a Polish neighbor over this way, dear old woman, I’ll dig out the recipes she lent me if I can find where they’ve gotten off toー) _The kitchen is a mess of raw ingredients, which Boris snoops through eagerly. “I think we may have found a school.”

“Really? That’s great!” I’m even more relieved than I thought I’d be to hear itー the school search hasn’t been encouraging, to say the least, and I was slowly resigning myself to the probability of commuting across the way to Jersey, or some similarly less than ideal situation.

“It turns out that a friend of Missus DeFreesー well, friend of a friend, reallyー knows the principal of a high school on the East Village side that specializes in transfer students. I never knew it existed, but there it is! I managed to catch him on the phone today,” Hobie explains in his meandering way, gathering his strewn grocery totes to hang up. “They’ll need your transcripts, of course, but we can go have a look-see after the Winter break is over and if everything seems in order, they’ll enroll you boys for the semester. It’s a great stroke of luck, if you ask me.” He smiles over an armful of onions he’s carting to the table. “Things have funny little ways of working themselves out.”

I meet Boris’s eye over at the counter, where he’s inconspicuously chomping on a sliver of cucumber, and I find that I can’t help but agree. 

  
  
  


Hobie’s Christmas feast is, as expected, spectacular. Herb-crusted beef roast and a whole chicken and more sides than I know what to do with or name, even, plus our array of desserts (_piernik, makowiec, sernik _ ー Boris explains, gingerbread loaf and poppyseed roll and, indeed, cheesecake, with the jars of syrupy fruit _ kompot _); it’s so good that we nearly make ourselves sick with how much we eat, and even then there are tons of leftovers. I suspect Hobie is used to cooking for a crowd on holidays, and though he doesn’t say a word about changing up his schedule to have a Christmas with just the three of us, I guess it easily enough when he leaves for a night out the next evening.

With the house to ourselves, Boris and I end up on Welty’sー our?ー floor, stuffed with leftovers and passing a bottle of Stoli back and forth, the prize of our most recent booze run. A sated Popchik is snoozing on the mattress, having passed out while we were watching a pirated version of _ A Christmas Story _ on our laptop earlier. The warmth of the vodka is settling into me like an old friend and I’m pleasantly drunk, but nowhere near the level of hammered I always aimed for in Vegas. Partly because I think it’s a stupid idea to do so in Hobie’s house, and partly because the simple act of being _ alive _ is no longer the unbearable, suffocating weight from which I was constantly trying to escape out there. 

Actually, this is the best I’ve felt sinceー well, _ before_. It’s almost as if we’re in a bubble, Boris and I, tucked away from the world where nobody can see us or find us. Our stomachs are full, our clothes fit, we’re clean, we have a soft bed to sleep in, we’re _ safe _, and all of it bundles together into a surge of some strangely invincible feeling throughout my body.

“I was sure there would never be a better Christmas dinner in my whole life than the dinner at MGM Grand, but...Mister Hobie’s was better.” Boris delivers it like some great secret, taking a pull from the bottle before sliding it into my lap; we’re pressed into each other’s sides, shoulder to hip to knee, and I’m not sure how we got this way but I don’t try to move. Who’s going to see us, anyway? 

“Maybe not so fancy or exciting, but God, I can die happy after tasting that roast.”

“Are you kidding?” I gulp down another burning sip of the vodka. “This was better in like, every way. Who needs all that other shit?” I definitely don’t, and in fact, I can hardly envision a more perfect Christmas than this was, especially considering that before we left Vegas I was sure this Christmas would be spent all on my sad sack lonesome with Boris off fucking around with Kotku, or something. 

He chose to come with me, though.

He chose _ me_.

“There _ is _ one thing that Christmas had that this does not,” Boris says, in the serious tone that means he’s about to spew some absolute bullshit. “Xandra’s little red dress she wore on that night. _ Ah, _I dream about it!” 

“Don’t be fucking gross, man.” I jam my shoulder against his, like it could do the job of knocking the smarmy smirk off his face. He jabs me back.

“It’s truth, Potter, you know it!”

“No fucking way_, _ ” I grin, pushing him again; from there we devolve into shoving at each other, and laughing, and shoving harder and laughing more until one particular shove is too much for my alcohol-dizziness and I topple flat on my back with a _ thunk_, but it doesn’t matter, because we’re the only ones here.

Nobody can hear us. Nobody can see us.

In a blink Boris is hovering over me, boxing my shoulders in between his arms, sporting a wild grin like he used to when he would gain the upper hand in our wrestling matches. “Admit it!” 

His cheeks are flushed from the vodka, eyes dark and glossyー ruffled strands of hair in his face and wind-chapped lips and an overflow of his boisterous, untamed spirit, coarse and raw and _ tangible _ in a way that’s always been maddeningly, hopelessly attractive, and I’m the only one who gets to see it now, because it’s just us two here and nobody can find us and he chose _ me _andー

I spring up and crash our mouths together.

I’m a little off target, and it only takes about a second for me to realize what I’m doing and reel back in horror. I justー fuckー Boris is staring at me with wide eyes, and he hasn’t moved an inch, and I can’t believe I jumped first, I fucking jumped _ first_, oh God, I just fucked up everythingー 

Time itself, suspended in that singular moment, breaks free with the tiny shudder of a sigh that escapes Boris, close enough for me to feel it on my face. His brows draw together, and his throat jerks with a gulp, and then he’s swooping in to kiss me for real.

He crushes his mouth to mine with enough force to send me back onto the floor and he follows right along, cupping my face in his hands, and I’m so stunned I almost can’t moveー for all the times the deep-down, secretive part of myself had held and guarded and skimmed the edges of that memory of us on a Vegas street and wondered, it’s actually _ happening _ now; I bring my hand up, slow, shaky, and grip onto the sleeve of his sweater like an anchor.

Boris kisses me like we can drown in it, warm lips and punchy breaths of air and fingers along my jaw again and again and _ again _ until I’m sinking so far I have no hope of pushing away. My heart is jackhammering in my chest so hard the rest of my body trembles with it, prickling and flooding with heat, like the razing warmth of alcohol times a hundred. _ I’m kissing Boris, _ my dazed brain goggles, _ I’m kissing Boris? I’m kissing Boris! _

My glasses get pushed askew when Boris pulls me in more urgently, parts his mouth against mineー the hot, messy slide of our tongues sets fire to the kindling in my gut in a way that yanks me into hazy memories of the drunken nights together we never speak of. Every sense in my body is cranked to high alert, alarm bells clanging _ danger danger danger _in my head, and in the thrill of it I drag us closer together.

How many times had I been forced to watch Boris with Kotku like this? Turning my head from them after class? Sitting sullen while they rolled around behind me on my own couch? I prop myself up and Boris moves with me; blindly I fumble a hand into the wildness of his hair, tangling my fingers in it, and the high-pitched noise he chokes into my mouth emboldens me to prod him over until we’re flipped, Boris on his back and me pushing down over him, catching us up in another bruising kiss. 

Now I’ll never have to see Boris and Kotku together again, because he chose _ me_, he’s _ mー _

Somewhere below us, the faint but unmistakable thump of the front door swinging shut reverberates throughout the house, and our bubble bursts.

A bucket of ice water might as well have been dumped over me for how quickly the heat in my body extinguishes. My limbs lock up and I stare wide-eyed at Boris, at the shock I see reflected back at me. The sounds I’d been deaf to come suddenly rushing backー Sixth Avenue traffic outside, sirens in the distance, a yelping dog, the world that very much still exists. 

“I’m home!” Hobie calls, close enough to have already made it up the stairs, and that’s what kicks my terror into action. I jerk away from Boris in a flash, who moves fast to recap the abandoned vodka bottle and stuff it into his backpack. Useless in my panic, all I manage to do is throw myself down on the mattress and startle Popper awake while the thud of Hobie’s footsteps grow closer to our half-open doorー we didn’t even close the fucking _ door_, how stupid are we?

Boris flops down beside me and pulls the laptop in front of us just as Hobie appears in the doorway, dressed in the dapper suit he went out in. 

“How was your evening, you three?” He asks, sounding merrily tipsy. My heart pumps with heavy dread, convinced he’ll catch the sting of alcohol in the air, or, even worse, take one look at our red faces and swollen lips and _ know, _ like a giant neon sign above our heads flashing _ SPIT SWAPPING! SPIT SWAPPING IN THIS VERY BEDROOM! _

“Ah, we ate so much again, Popchyk most of all,” Boris answers, and I boggle at how he can sound so _ normal _when I can’t even make eye contact with Hobie. 

On his end, at least, Hobie seems oblivious. “Good, good, glad to hear it,” he chortles, just before stifling a yawn. “Goodness me, I can’t do a night out on the town like I used to. I’m going to turn in nowー see you boys in the morning.”

“Good night,” we chorus, then sit in stuffy silence against the faint clunks of Hobie puttering about the bathroom and then, finally, the muffled click of his bedroom door down the far end of the hall. The entire time I’m awash in a spiral of contrition and distress and shameー if we’d heard Hobie even a bare minute later than we did, everything would be crumbling down around us right now. 

Even then, the fact that we broke apart before he saw it scarcely makes me feel better.

I’m an idiot. I’m _ such _an idiot.

I turn without looking at Boris and curl up on my side of the bed, stomach churning with all sorts of ugly words. I of all people should know, a crime with no witnesses is still a crime. 

Boris stays in one place for a long stretch, and I have no real idea what he’s thinking. At some point I feel him shift off the bed, close the laptop, lay it on the desk with a _ clack. _We plunge into darkness when he clicks the lamp off, so it’s only by moonlightー bright, actually, big and round and on the verge of fullnessー that I see Boris shut our door and firmly wedge the doorstop in place. 

When he turns and approaches the bed, he’s wearing the gratified look of having pulled off a heist. It throws me for a disorienting loop, to say the least. 

“He’s asleep now, I know it,” Boris murmurs, clambering atop me and pushing on my shoulder in an attempt to flatten me to the bed; in my utter bafflement, I almost let him.

“Are youー are you _ serious?” _ I hiss. This whole time he was justー waiting to pick up where we left off? “Hobie almost _ caught us! _”

How does he not understand the gravity of this?

_Get him off you, _a cold voice of foreboding whispers within me. _Get him off you now__._

Boris huffs out a sigh. “Yes, almost, but he did not! That’s the fun of it!” He pushes at my shoulder again, but I don’t budge. He frowns.

“_God_, Potter, you worry so much about _ everything! _ Mister Hobie is asleep now! Can you honestly tell me you just want to _ stop_?”

Boris is staring down at me with moonlit eyes, lower lip jutted, and I swallow thickly; the vodka-sharp taste of him is still in my mouth. My heart, just calmed, begins to pick up speed again. I don’t know what to do hereー every other experience we’ve had in the vicinity of this territory always ended with Boris acting as if it didn’t happen, and therefore _ I _ acted like it didn’t happen. 

Does this mean he thinks it’s alright? Did that change too, when we climbed into the cab together?

“Hobie might hear us,” I protest, and it sounds weak, even to my ears. Is that really the most compelling argument I can come up with? I had a whole list of them not even ten minutes ago. Boris shifts his legs around my hips, and I could easily shove him off. I don’t. 

Boris nudges my shoulder once more, and I finally roll down with its guidance. He grins, plucking my glasses from my face and tossing them onto the nightstand. “Then keep quiet, asshole.”

This time, his kiss tastes like a wicked promise.

**Author's Note:**

> come yell at me on  
[tumblr](https://theodyker.tumblr.com/)


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